Well, of course I respectfully disagree.
SPV clients like Bitcoin Wallet can be instant-on. They are not today because the programming involved is tricky and not completed yet. But we'll get there eventually. I already find Bitcoin Wallet to catch up plenty fast enough if I enable the "sync on power" option, I think in future Andreas will make this option on by default so all users benefit. It means typically the client is only a few hours behind. And of course you can spend without being fully caught up to the chain head.
The primary remaining issues are reliability (if you connect to an overloaded peer sync can be very slow), storage costs (this can be solved quite easily), and bandwidth consumption, the fix for which is largely implemented by Matt and just needs review+merge+people to upgrade.
Running SPV on a phone is by far the hardest solution to make work well. It is also theoretically the best in terms of security, privacy and how closely it matches Satoshis vision of a truly P2P system. I think once the remaining performance problems are solved there won't be much incentive to use other types of wallet.
Any solution which involves keys being stored on the server is a non-starter for me. There have been too many cases of wallets hosted by third parties getting hacked. Not to mention the legal issues.
For me the Schildbach-Client was a no go for its heavy data usage. How can this theoretically be brought down to some one digit MB per month? I see the privacy benefits now but what else would put the Schildbach client ahead of the Spinner approach? (Sure, paytunia is no option. I fully agree on that.) |
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Hmm … now that I think about it:
Spinner needs a simple API. getBalance(address), maybe getHistory(address) and send(signedTransaction).
Without looking in the code I assume all this is publicly available even without Spinner, so I could have a website that uses your Spinner-server making you believe to have 10,000 wallets more and the numbers you named are actually addresses you ever received via the public getBalance API.
Anyway you should have a pretty clear picture of how many wallets are daily active, weekly active and monthly active although a sample of some 800 users is most likely not sufficient to get a consistent picture.
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@gizmo Instawallet is added twice to the poll.
indeed  thanx |
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Cool, thanks for the detailed info If you happen to have trend graphs of the charged wallets or a grand total of Ƀs Spinner is being trusted with, I would be very curious to see these  Thanks for your numbers. Here are Bitcoin Wallet numbers: - Total installs to date: 18016 (plus several hundreds from the downloads page)
- Active device installs: 5513
- Cannot say about installs with actual BTC in them, as I would feel myself bad eavesdropping on peoples "bank accounts".
As you might guess from what I said above, I see no problem in stating what Jan stated above at all. Telling that x wallets hold 1 Satoshi or more is only stating that these people actually have and maybe use (certainly used) an account as opposed to had an account that they maybe used or not. Spinner has a technical necessity for "eavesdropping" and adding a report-balance functionality to Bitcoin Wallet would indeed be more than rude so I hope that what you actually meant to say is that you do not have these numbers. |
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Added, as well as Instawallet. Usability tests still pending. Easywallet seams to have many more features than instawallet, which I like. Hope I also trust you some day like I trust instawallet (for whatever reason ). And how about the fees? Also: Would you sell me BTC at 5$? The Scan QR Code button does not work on my Motorola Defy but it works on my Motorola XT531. Edit: The defy was just slow. 2 minutes slow. Else the QR-Code integration is cool The page seams a bit lengthy: For the trust part I want just to say that we are a registered company in Finland, and I as the head of that company am public person - for example, I have been organizing the bitcoin hackathon events and I was also a speaker at last bitcoin conference. The fees are now fixed 0.002 BTC per outgoing bitcoin transaction (bitcoin network fee included), transactions between easywallet.org instances are free and instant (also more privacy, no real bitcoin transaction is generated). Features like dead mans switch and coupons have their own fees. We will try to make the page shorter & less text-heavy. I personally will definitely have more an eye on easywallet now. Instawallet re-vamped their design just recently and I expect them to copy some of your features. I use instawallet mainly to show people with a smart-phone how easy they can accept bitcoins right away but also send instawallets by mail keeping a bookmark to collect the full BTC after some months after announcing to collect it after "one month or so". Your dead-man switch and coupon codes might be more elegant for the latter. The former is nicer with instawallet though as instawallet seams to long-poll for incoming coins. |
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Ok smartass, let me just quote wikipedia for you Security through obscurity is a pejorative referring to a principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy of design or implementation to provide security. A password by itself is useless - you need the associated login name.
Oh, and what are you doing here ? How about letting the grown-ups do the talking ? Don't feed the troll. |
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Hmm... I'm so glad I have all of my bitcoins "under a matress" right now. In times like these, I really do wonder about the future of bitcoin. When people ask me "what can you buy with bitcoins?", I'm not really sure what to say anymore, because I don't really trust anyone enough to buy anything with bitcoins. I'd rather buy items with paypal, and sell items for bitcoin. And I will settle for selling items for paypal.
Has the bootstrapping of the bitcoin economy hit an insurmountable wall?
Oh come on! There is tons of stuff you can use it for where you instantly get your product. The only problem is with sites that hold huge amounts in escrow. |
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Good article but I'm afraid the early part on hashing might get many readers loose appetite as she had to stay so much on the surface that it is actually barely understandable without a background in bitcoins. (aka /sub. Yes, I know there is the watch feature but for some reason some threads exclusively show up in the list of unread replies. Merge these two lists and I post less ) |
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...
I was kind of surprised to see Spinner is not the most successful according to the market numbers.
...
The public market numbers just show how many have downloaded the app. The numbers do not show how many still have it on their device, or whether they use it. Spinner was not around during the big bubble last year, as it was made public some time in November 2011. My guess is that many entered and left during the bubble. Being an Android dev myself, I know that. Still downloads is the closest guess you get publicly. Other apps might be more popular for people compiling themselves or maybe some app is booming on the kindle. Or maybe even easywallet could be successful on the iPhone. Who knows. Sorry for guessing |
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Paytunia app for Android is the simplest and fastest (PIN code can be set optionnally)
Too bad it's not on the list.
I assume you are affiliated as simpler and faster than Spinner seams doubtful to me and for my wallet, simple and fast is not the main argument. How about secure and open source? I use our wallet app easywallet.org - it works as easily as a native app, and recently we introduced one-tap payment -functionality. This is handy in the restaurant I go to, which accepts bitcoins. Of course this kind of low-security hosted wallet is only suitable for small pocket change. I use it for small payments between friends, and to pay for my lunch in my favourite bitcoin-accepting restaurant, vegemesta Edit: One-tap-payments: http://localbitcoins.blogspot.de/2012/09/one-tap-bitcoin-payments-with.htmlAdded, as well as Instawallet. Usability tests still pending. Easywallet seams to have many more features than instawallet, which I like. Hope I also trust you some day like I trust instawallet (for whatever reason ). And how about the fees? Also: Would you sell me BTC at 5$? The Scan QR Code button does not work on my Motorola Defy but it works on my Motorola XT531. Edit: The defy was just slow. 2 minutes slow. Else the QR-Code integration is cool The page seams a bit lengthy:  |
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Bitcoin is backed by drama.
A hopefully exponentially growing user base will keep the drama/educated ratio at least constant. Absolute numbers in businesses and under-educated bitcoin users grows but this has to compete with ever more questions bitcoin businesses get asked by the fast growing group of educated users.
If drama disappears we can safely assume that bitcoin stopped growing.
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It would be nice to have an educated, well thought out, and reasonable estimate of the amount of time it would take for a large fraction of users to have the BTC symbol work (and for someone to fill in all the assumptions with reasonable guesses)...
Well, sorry but the discussion in this thread is less about BTC than about the general UTF-8 code to be used when communicating bitcoin and when it comes to that, using some web-font is no solution as not every form of communication allows to paint pretty pictures (use webfonts). Also I see it as no solution to add some post in the Meta-subforum on how to make BTC display well when we want newbies to come and feel at home without having to jump through loops prior to using the forum. OS X 10.5.8 So, an OS that is now 5 years old and beyond end of life (no more security fixes). You shouldn't even be allowed online with that. There are plenty of older systems around, if you really want to enforce your ideal OS standard then I'll believe it when you turn up on my doorstep. I'm easy to find. At the very least, it's grounds for automatic ignoring complaints about standard things not working for you. The bugs were already fixed, you're just using a known-buggy version. You may very well ignore his complaint concerning his system but you might have noticed that there are many others with fully updated machines that have severe issues that you can't ignore. For them you only have your religious reasons about pushing standards against any common sense. Suggesting that people who aren't upgraded to the latest version of something should be discounted is really elitist.
Believe it or not, I met elitist people on this very forum Luke, did you get giant BTC tatooed on your butt that you defend it so religiously?
No, he has B|| on his forehead. Furthermore, I consider that we should use Ƀ as the official Bitcoin symbol. |
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Luke -- here's how it renders on Mountain Lion / chrome:  pfft! oh my god! coffee everywhere |
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Any progress on bringing this to the google market in a stand-alone apk? If you lack a developer account, I might add it under my account (which would mean me getting involved in its development  ) please go ahead, if you feel like it Actually I feel like "Spinner works great for me" and a bit like "I have a google developer account where I could bring more bitcoin stuff to regular Android users if it means barely more than reviewing code for backdoors and hitting the publish button". |
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Any progress on bringing this to the google market in a stand-alone apk? If you lack a developer account, I might add it under my account (which would mean me getting involved in its development ) |
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This "metal detector" is a joke as stated by the most up-voted comment. Instawallet invites users to create thousands of wallets for whatever meaningful use with their api and a real metal detector would rather look for man-made wallets like https://www.instawallet.org/w/forAndrea or similar dictionary matches. |
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Isn't there an Electrum Android wallet app? I haven't used it since I don't have a smart phone. But someday I will - not much demand for it out here in the rice fields. Maybe that should be on the poll list?
link? I searched google play market for bitcoin and went through the 4 pages of results adding every app that looked like a "use this to send and receive bitcoins with your android" app. (I was surprised to see the blockchain app was actually based on Schildbach's app.) |
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Which are you using?
The vote doesn't support multiple selections. Some people run several apps, Uhm … you are right but that was not my intention and neither can I edit this now I put 99 to the field "allowed votes" as I didn't know how many options others might provide. Can a mod change that poll? How do I do it right so I can always allow people to check all options even when options get added? I would assume, 99 is > than option count resulting in 1. Setting count to 0 also results in it being 1. grr. and sorry for polluting the local-other sub-forum. I read it as the "other" forum. Meta-sandbox please!  Edit: Thanx to whoever fixed the multi-select. |
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I liked Bitcoin Wallet when it was first released but in Chile bound to prepaid internet switched to BitcoinSpinner and definitely will not switch back. The MtGox client has very bad ratings so I don't even bother trying it out. I was kind of surprised to see Spinner is not the most successful according to the market numbers. Why are you using others? Which are you using? Do you use Websites on the go instead of an app? Tell me and I add options. Edits: |
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