It talks to bitcoind, which does download the entire blockchain.

Do you know what any of those words mean?

So many people have lost bitcoins because they tried to roll their own overly-complex cold storage.

No, I found the link on Reddit and posted it here because it looked interesting.

I don't know what to think about the accusations.

Yamamushi is going to be there, trying to see if he can win the scavenger hunt for a sixth year in a row.

Maybe.

I'm more worried about it being private than I am worried about it being safe.

It's possible to use 256 bit seeds with BIP32, and I'm sure Armory will do that. The only reason Electrum uses smaller seeds is to make their word list shorter.

The user interface for Electrum is... primitive compared to Armory. I couldn't even begin to list all the things.

If you just upload keys to the keyservers for each address you advertise, then those who want to use it can do so without needing to bothering you. If you're going to be the only one reading them then you don't actually need to generate new keys - just add a new UID to yours.

Something else that would be nice is Bitmessages addresses as an alternate contact method. It's actually not too hard to integrate Bitmessage into an existing email workflow, as long as you operate your own IMAP/SMTP servers.

Maybe I don't want every ISP between you and me knowing which non-profits I choose to donate to(*).

In general, emails should be encrypted unless there's a very good reason to leave them in cleartext.


(*) What if the next presidential administration really dislikes the organization I donate to and directs the IRS to track down everybody who has ever donated to them and hit them with tax audits? That would never happen in a free country though, right?

Con: Electrum has a very primitive and unpolished UI.

Pro: It does require you to download the entire blockchain to use

Con: Not downloading the entire blockchain yourself means you're reliant on other servers to be able to use your wallet and you have less privacy.

Armory requires more resources, but it has a much better backup system, and makes complicated tasks easier.

No PGP key on the keyservers for the donationmatch address?

At least you've had deterministic wallets from the beginning and never encouraged address reuse. That's not lagging nearly as badly as some...

Blockchain.info has a lot to answer for, since they are the single biggest contributing factor to spreading the address reuse poison throughout the ecosystem.

At least Mycelium is actively working on BIP32 - I've heard of no such commitment from BC.i

That's a thing that could be done, I suppose.

I consider it more likely that the USA goes the way of the USSR than the possibility that they could pull that kind of a rabbit out of their hat.

Certainly altcoin pumpers have an incentive to spread the meme that it's impossible to upgrade Bitcoin, but that doesn't make it true.

So a year after this thread was started efficient offline signing is still not possible, and there is no clear path for getting features like new hash types into the protocol, even though everything is versioned and upgrades have happened in the past.

"Backing" is a kind of awkward hack that attempts to limit the production of currency.

It never really worked in the first place, and it's completely unnecessary now that we can just use math to limit the supply of the currency.

That's exactly why deterministic wallets were invented.

You create one offline, print m-of-n paper backups of the seed, then you can have as many addresses as you could ever want and your backups are valid forever.

Armory does not belong in the same category as Coinbase.

Coinbase is a Bitcoin bank that takes your actual coins and gives you bitcoin IOUs for them.

Armory is the best cold storage solution for holding your own coins, better than brainwallets or paper wallets by far.

Armory.

Since the deployed solution is going to need to send data in both directions, you should probably just consider simultaneous bidirectional communication to be part of the requirements.