Multibit long term reliability?

[hodedowe]

-snip-
What do you mean with false positives?

Adding someone elses bitcoin address (as watch only ofc) will create wrong assumptions when someone wants to detect which address are yours and how much bitcoin you have.

Can you expand on this some?

[1715212777]

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[wlefever]

The commenters on the MultiBit architecture are correct.

MultiBit HD connects directly to Bitcoin Core/XT nodes to:
+ get transaction data
+ send transactions

It connects to multibit.org for various housekeeping things but fails over and keeps going if multibit.org is down.
Specifically:
+ it checks a file on multibit.org to see if there is a new version(no multibit.org = no upgrade notification)
+ it gets the help from multibit.org (fails over to a local copy of the help - it'll be a bit out of date but no big deal)
+ if you create a new wallet it does a BRIT exchange to get a list of fee addresses (fails over to a hardwired list).

In V0.1.1 you no longer will see an annoying 'MultiBit HD - internet connection' dialog if our server is down - we've fixed that.

tl;dr; If the multibit.org server goes down you can carry on using MultiBit HD for all your bitcoin related tasks.


Blocking multibit.org in your firewall would be a good way to simulate that yes if you wanted to test it. Please unblock it once you've run the test ! :-)

Thanks for this. I too was wondering.

[shorena]

-snip-
What do you mean with false positives?

Adding someone elses bitcoin address (as watch only ofc) will create wrong assumptions when someone wants to detect which address are yours and how much bitcoin you have.

Can you expand on this some?

When you are using electrum you get the all data from a server. If this server wanted to spy on you, they could know all your addresses and the balances. They cant spend your coins and if they would block your transactions you would probably connect to a different server. I assume the default configuration connects to a different server from time to time anyway, but lets assume you manually select a specific server for this. As above this server knows for which addresses you request information. If you now add a watch only addresses from a stranger you would also request information for that address. This could lead to false information about you. You cant actually spend those coins as you dont know the private key, you just know the address. For the server however it looks like the address is yours. Thats what Muhammed Zakir was refering to as "false positives". Its a positive in regards to "does address Y belong to X?", but in fact Y does not belong to X.

[hodedowe]

-snip-
What do you mean with false positives?

Adding someone elses bitcoin address (as watch only ofc) will create wrong assumptions when someone wants to detect which address are yours and how much bitcoin you have.

Can you expand on this some?

When you are using electrum you get the all data from a server. If this server wanted to spy on you, they could know all your addresses and the balances. They cant spend your coins and if they would block your transactions you would probably connect to a different server. I assume the default configuration connects to a different server from time to time anyway, but lets assume you manually select a specific server for this. As above this server knows for which addresses you request information. If you now add a watch only addresses from a stranger you would also request information for that address. This could lead to false information about you. You cant actually spend those coins as you dont know the private key, you just know the address. For the server however it looks like the address is yours. Thats what Muhammed Zakir was refering to as "false positives". Its a positive in regards to "does address Y belong to X?", but in fact Y does not belong to X.

Thank you for clarifying! That makes sense. So tell me this, if I were say, the government of Greece and I wanted to monitor all BTC transfers and tax or even ban a user, I could buy the Electrum server and boom, I'm in business.

That's a little scary.

[shorena]

-snip-
Thank you for clarifying! That makes sense. So tell me this, if I were say, the government of Greece and I wanted to monitor all BTC transfers and tax or even ban a user, I could buy the Electrum server and boom, I'm in business.

That's a little scary.

Not exactly, you would have to make sure every citizen is using your server which is next to impossible. Its also very difficult (even for a state) to connect an IP address directly to a person. Most IP addresses are used by several persons and they can easily be hidden, e.g. via Tor, a proxy or a VPN.

[hodedowe]

But if I owned Electrum then I would own all the electrum users, correct? By own, I mean I can know their balances, tax them, and/or block them from accessing their funds.

[shorena]

But if I owned Electrum then I would own all the electrum users, correct?

Nope, anyone can run an electrum server and since electrum is open source people can check for backdoors in the code (wallet and server).

[bitcoinmasterlord]

-snip-
What do you mean with false positives?

Adding someone elses bitcoin address (as watch only ofc) will create wrong assumptions when someone wants to detect which address are yours and how much bitcoin you have.

Is this a feature of Multibit? I'm not aware that this can be done with Electrum, for example. Or do you speak about posting addresses? Sounds risky, if such address can be connected to other addresses that belong to a spammer then you might get red trust. Of course one could simply use an address from a websites wallet.

[hodedowe]

-snip-
What do you mean with false positives?

Adding someone elses bitcoin address (as watch only ofc) will create wrong assumptions when someone wants to detect which address are yours and how much bitcoin you have.

Is this a feature of Multibit? I'm not aware that this can be done with Electrum, for example. Or do you speak about posting addresses? Sounds risky, if such address can be connected to other addresses that belong to a spammer then you might get red trust. Of course one could simply use an address from a websites wallet.

You can do this with Electrum, I posted a link above.

[bitcoinmasterlord]

-snip-
What do you mean with false positives?

Adding someone elses bitcoin address (as watch only ofc) will create wrong assumptions when someone wants to detect which address are yours and how much bitcoin you have.

Is this a feature of Multibit? I'm not aware that this can be done with Electrum, for example. Or do you speak about posting addresses? Sounds risky, if such address can be connected to other addresses that belong to a spammer then you might get red trust. Of course one could simply use an address from a websites wallet.

You can do this with Electrum, I posted a link above.

I nearly did not find your link about the cold wallets but the link about false positive addresses i can't find at all. Can you give the link again or point me to the thread you posted it in?