Is MultiBit buggy?

[RippleAway]

I'm using Bitcoin-Qt, but it's too resource hungry. That is why I'm looking into MultiBit. Browing this subforum gives me the impression that MultiBit is quite buggy. Is that really the case or are most claims of bugginess really user errors?

[Mike Hearn]

You can't really lose money so why not try it and see how it works for you.

Until quite recently there were a bunch of issues that could cause peoples wallets to lose sync with the network. A couple were genuine bugs that were fixed, and others were to do with a key import/backup restore ui that was hard for people to use correctly. The combination of the bugfixes and the changed/simplified ui seems to have fixed things.

[RoxxR]

You can't really lose money so why not try it and see how it works for you.

Until quite recently there were a bunch of issues that could cause peoples wallets to lose sync with the network. A couple were genuine bugs that were fixed, and others were to do with a key import/backup restore ui that was hard for people to use correctly. The combination of the bugfixes and the changed/simplified ui seems to have fixed things.

Now this is a little misleading isn't it? The Issues page has more than a few cases of BTC lost: https://github.com/jim618/multibit/issues

[jim618]

All software has bugs and there are hundreds of thousands of MultiBit users on all sorts of platforms.
Happy users don't typically post on fora and issues databases - they just fire up MultiBit, do whatever they want to do, and close it down.

The MultiBit code (and the bitcoinj code behind it) is IMHO pretty stable now.

The main reasons for people losing bitcoin I would say have been:

+ No backups of wallets and private keys. This was more of a problem before the automatic backups went in (version 0.5.13) which have really helped.
+ Someone has their laptop stolen / reformatted etc and there are no copies of wallets elsewhere.
+ Forgetting passwords.
+ I haven't got absolute proof, but I think there is malware+ keyloggers attacking MultiBit (and probably also Bitcoin-QT + Electrum) wallets.

People running old code is also problematic - you should DEFINATELY be running a copy of MultiBit with encrypted wallets and automatic backups or else you are adding unnecessary risk to your bitcoin life.


Generally, if you have a safe copy of all your private keys then you can recover your bitcoin if things go wrong. I've written up how to transfer your bitcoin from MultiBit to blockchain.info if you need to do this:
https://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_movingAWallet.html

[freemoney458]

I am one of those happy users who never or rarely report anything.
I never lost a single satoshi or bitcoin using MultiBit.

I think it is again time to remember what a great software MultiBit is and to say:
Thank you! to all the developers behind the scenes and especially to Mike and Jim.

[RippleAway]

Thanks.

So basically it's enough if I encrypt my wallet and have the MultiBit wallet directory backed up, eg to an encrypted cloud.

I'll give it a shot.

p.s. Is bulk copy/export possible? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421698.0

[newts]

This is a very well written program,  especially the latest version.  The only issue I ever had was remembering ctrl-v=paste when doing a signature.

As far as backups,  just make an image of your C: drive once a week, should be doing that any way.