Dear Bitcoiners,

Since the 1st of january I have officially left my previous job (computer scientist at INRIA) in order to work full time on the development of Electrum. My plan is to create a company, Electrum Technologies, that will distribute the Electrum software, and sell related services. This company project is now officially supported by the incubator of the french region Lorraine (http://incubateurlorrain.org/ ); we signed the contract yesterday.

I am now working on version 2.0 of Electrum. The following features are under development:

1. A Patricia tree data structure, also called "Ultimate Blockchain Compression", will be implemented in Electrum servers. This data structure allows a client to get the balance of any address instantly, and it will also generate a "proof of completeness" (the root hash of the patricia tree), that can be used to check that the server sent all UTXOs related to a given address to the client. A first implementation of this patricia tree was recently completed, and is available in the 'fulltree' branch of the Electrum server. This prototype uses a 256-way branching, and can import recent blocks at 2s/block. Following maaku's suggestion ( https://github.com/maaku/bips/blob/master/drafts/auth-trie.mediawiki ), I plan to upgrade it with binary branching. I also look forward to maaku's C++ implementation, which should be much faster than Python.

2. Version 2.0 will use BIP32 wallets with multiple accounts (this feature was initially planned for 1.9, but it had to be postponed)
Some of these accounts will have no "gap limit", so that merchants can create arbitrary numbers of addresses without messing with the internal parameters of their wallet.

3. Version 2.0 will have a daemon mode, that remains always connected, and that can be queried with json-rpc. This means that shell scripts will be able to use multiple Electrum commands without without opening and closing sockets for each command.

4. A 2-factor authentication service using multisig addresses is under development, that will be available in Electrum through a paying plugin. I made a demonstration of that service in Barcelona last fall, during the meeting organized by genjix. I am now working with lawyers, in order to define the terms of use for that service.

The ETA for version 2.0 (including points 2 and 3) is about 1 month from now. The multisig service (4) will probably require an extra month in order to be finalized.

I am looking forward to the coming months, and I hope to deliver the best possible software.

Thomas

Note: I will attend the Berlin conference in february; send me a note if you want to meet me there.

I am currently working on such a plugin. Expect an announcement soon.

sorry but the merchant script is broken in the current release.
I am trying to fix it asap but I really have lots of things to do, so don't expect it too soon..

It would be perfectly possible to create a centralized service that stores annotations, and to use it in Electrum through a plugin.
This would be a public version of the existing "labelectrum" plugin, and could be used by other wallets.

Another option is to see if blockchain.info allows the addition of public notes from users who are not registered with them.

this is what is called "dust change".
see https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/543

no conversion is needed, it is the same file type. only the name changed.

it is fixed with 1.9.7 (don't pay attention to the "transaction not related to your wallet" thing)

no, it is not.
but I do have plans for that, to be announced soon.

version 1.9.7 is available (source code)
as usual, binaries will follow soon.

changes:
# Release 1.9.7
* Fix for offline signing
* Various bugfixes
* GUI usability improvements
* Coinbase Buyback plugin

why don't you use the scripts in the scripts directory?

I called the support at gandi.net planet-work.com.
After a short investigation, they decided to take down the fake website.

I just registered an account on reddit.
My username on reddit is ThomasV1  (ThomasV was already taken)

WARNING: a fake version of https://electrum.org is out, distributing malware:


This was reported on reddit here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1tin7f/warning_a_fake_electrum_website_with_malware_is/

The legitimate electrum website is https://electrum.org
We are curently reporting this abuse to the domain registrar.

The old code hashes the hex representation, which is a pretty harmless bug (no loss of entropy), but cannot be changed for compatibility reasons.

The new code will hash the string directly.
It is an arbitrary string, not an hex number representation.

so, no, it's not a bug, it is intentional.

in a terminal:

if you cannot use a terminal, use the 'restore' menu to create a watching only wallet

"deseed" is not available in the python console. it is only available in the terminal.

it improves security. previous versions used to write the unencrypted seed first.
however, there is no guarantee that the encrypted wallet will be written on the same disk sector.

there are plans for two factor authentication.
(it will first use google authnticator, but yubikey should be possible)

what you are reporting is either a very serious bug, or a serious misunderstanding...
can you provide more details? what exactly did you do?

you are right. currently, the offline wallet does not check that the change output actually is a change address.
thanks for pointing it; it should be relatively easy to fix.

version 1.9.6 is released.

Changes:
 - During wallet creation, does not write seed to disk until it is encrypted.
 - Shows a confirmation dialog if the transaction fee is higher than 1mBTC.
 - fixes for various bugs reported recently.

Linux packages for now. Binaries for Win and Mac will follow.