MultiBit HD 0.1 released

[sickhouse]

This transaction is taking ages!


Why is it set to medium priority? I haven't touched any fee settings, it's taken over 1 hour now I am worried I will lose it..

EDIT: OK now it's on high prio, I changed the fee to 0.0001 instead.

[jim618]

The stress test on Monday created a huge backlog of transactions so that is most likely the cause.

If you want to see the state of the Bitcoin network, TradeBlock is excellent:
https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/

[5cMXezpBtm]

Why is there no balance column in the payments tab, like e.g. on mytrezor.com? It would be comfortable, if one could see what the wallet balance was before a transaction and afterwards, so one can see if all is right. Or did I miss something?

[jim618]

@5cMXezpBtm

The short answer is that we don't want to show too many numbers on the main MultiBit HD screen.

Long answer:

Most bitcoiners are pretty numerate but a surprising number of people don't like numbers.
If you see someone, say in a cafe, with a spreadsheet or adding up numbers and ask them what they are doing they will answer 'oh, it's just work'. They never say: "oh, just having some fun with numbers Check this out !'.

If you do a side by side comparision of MultiBit Classic and HD, say here, you can see that the number of visual elements (and especially numbers) is much reduced. This is to keep things simple and reduce the cognitive load of using MultiBit HD.


Longer answer:

There are a few things in bitcoin which aren't as simple as they appear.
For instance: as Bitcoin is fully decentralised time is a bit amorphous. Time in common parlance is always monotonic, you have a well defined 'before' and 'after' and hence can order transactions. You cannot really do this in Bitcoin but all wallets fudge it slightly as we are so used to monotonically increasing time. (If you have done any special relativity it is similar, 'before' and 'after' are not well defined for space-like intervals.

Also the idea of a balance of a wallet at a particular point in time is a little bit conditional. A wallet is really saying:
"As far as I know from the information from the peers I am connected to, given the current state of the main chain, which may be reorganised at any time, the total of all the unspent transaction outputs under control of the private keys in this wallet is X BTC". There are a few ifs and buts in there.

You can quite legitimately have two versions of MultiBit HD running on different machines and they will see transactions at different times and in a different order and hence have different balances at a particular point in time.

With MultiBit HD we try to hide these complexities where possible and where it is safe to do so.

[sickhouse]

Update notes?

[sickhouse]

Again, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1118204.new#new, no transaction fee 24 hour wait time or so..

[jim618]

Transaction fees are definitely causing frustration to Bitcoin users at the moment.

At the moment in MBHD v0.1.1 a user can specify (in Preferences | Fees) a miners' fee of:

0.01 mBTC/ KB to 0.1 mBTC/ KB with a default value of 0.03 mBTC/KB


In the past the lower end of this fee range meant a delay in confirmation, but only a few blocks. Now, if your fee rate is lower than that of the spam transactions that are hitting the network there's a big delay.

In the upcoming release v0.1.2 we've extended the range to:

0.01 mBTC/KB to 0.5 mBTC/KB with a default for new installs of 0.1 mBTC/KB


Users are going to have to 'take a reading' for what spam is hitting the network and tweak their fees accordingly. Choosing the lower end of the fee range is going to encounter a delay. This may or may not be acceptable depending on what you are doing.

There isn't a reliable decentralised way of knowing what the fee distribution of transactions in the Bitcoin network is currently.

edit: corrected figures.

[sickhouse]

Transaction fees are definitely causing frustration to Bitcoin users at the moment.

At the moment in MBHD v0.1.1 a user can specify (in Preferences | Fees) a miners' fee of:

0.01 mBTC/ KB to 0.1 mBTC/ KB with a default value of 0.03 mBTC/KB


In the past the lower end of this fee range meant a delay in confirmation, but only a few blocks. Now, if your fee rate is lower than that of the spam transactions that are hitting the network there's a big delay.

In the upcoming release v0.1.2 we've extended the range to:

0.01 mBTC/KB to 0.5 mBTC/KB with a default for new installs of 0.1 mBTC/KB


Users are going to have to 'take a reading' for what spam is hitting the network and tweak their fees accordingly. Choosing the lower end of the fee range is going to encounter a delay. This may or may not be acceptable depending on what you are doing.

There isn't a reliable decentralised way of knowing what the fee distribution of transactions in the Bitcoin network is currently.

edit: corrected figures.

I feel really unsecure regarding this, as far as I can see I can see there's only one thing regarding fees to change. I've maxed it out now to 0.0001...

"Users are going to have to 'take a reading' for what spam is hitting the network and tweak their fees accordingly." - where do I do this?

[jim618]

In 0.1.2 you can increase the fee to 0.000 5  BTC/KB if you need to.

There is no definitive place to find what the 'right' fee level is. I normally look at https://tradeblock.com/blockchain and watch the fees paid in the bottom right for a while.

Bitcoin core can also give you fee estimates via RPC if you have access to a node.

[HardcoreSuperstar]

At the top of the client, it is displayed " Backup failed. Please check history... "
What does it mean and how to fix it?

[jim618]

Most likely it means that it cannot copy the backups it creates periodically to the directory you have set as the cloud backup directory.
If you look in Manage wallet | Wallet dashboard you can see where it is trying to copy to.

There will be more details in the log file. This is in the application data directory (also shown in the Wallet dashboard) in the logs directory. It is the file multibit-hd.log

[HardcoreSuperstar]

Most likely it means that it cannot copy the backups it creates periodically to the directory you have set as the cloud backup directory.
If you look in Manage wallet | Wallet dashboard you can see where it is trying to copy to.

There will be more details in the log file. This is in the application data directory (also shown in the Wallet dashboard) in the logs directory. It is the file multibit-hd.log

Thank you Jim!
You are always ready to reply if anyone has a problem with Multibit.

I changed the directory I set as cloud backup and now it works properly. Quite strange anyway...

[jim618]

Thanks for your feedback - glad you got it working.

[withstupid]

is there a way to show what the value of 1 BTC is like in classic? it was always on the top right hand side. 

[jim618]

There is no currency ticker no - for MultiBit HD we've removed quite a lot from the UI (for simplicity's sake).
I tend to just use bitcoinaverage.com or preev.com