Standardizing Bitcoin Terminology

[grondilu]

What about "infinite wallet"?   By this I mean an analogy with "infinite lists" in programming languages.

Infinite lists can also be called "iterators" or "lazy lists", so the same idea could bring "lazy wallet" or "iterating wallet".

[cbeast]

Hot wallet, cold wallet, air-gapped wallet, deterministic wallet, are terms I use. They will change when technology changes. I like the gun analogy of single and double action for multisig transaction.

[etotheipi]

Hot wallet, cold wallet, air-gapped wallet, deterministic wallet, are terms I use. They will change when technology changes. I like the gun analogy of single and double action for multisig transaction.

There's plenty of "slang" that can be used.  I know that whatever we decide here will not automatically change the way people talk about these concepts.  It would be fine to even put in the glossary that "Sometimes "offline wallets" are referred to as "cold storage"".  But the important part is that application developers, in their apps, stick to consistent terminology.  Then, new users who don't read the forums have consistency across (and even within!) applications.  I mention "within", because even I've sometimes used different names for these things in different parts of Armory.

[thanke]

Another aspect when talking about properties of "wallets": what about distinguishing between wallets and keyrings? A wallet is typically more than a collection of keys or keypairs. It also contains transaction data, and meta data like accounts. Properties like deterministic, loose, watch-only etc. refer either to a keyring or to an individual key, not the wallet. A wallet could contain several keyrings with different properties.

BTW, I don't think deterministic is too technical.

[fornit]

disclaimer: english is not my first language, so my proposals might suck.

i think observer wallet is not a bad start. problem is, its not really a wallet at all. its not a wallet that observes things, its exactly the other way around. so something like "wallet observer" would be better imho. personally, i like "wallet monitor".

regarding (non-) deterministic wallets, i think it mostly depends on what you want to emphasize. the idea of determinism might be a bit tough to put into any short formulation. "permanent wallet" vs. "loose key collection" contains a good idea imho. why not just call them static and dynamic wallets?

[jim618]

What about:

+ a wallet contains either random addresses or linked addresses (= deterministic)

+ the wallet can be password protected (= private keys/master wallet key/seed are encrypted as appropriate) or not.

+ using any wallet you can create an observer wallet that is identical except you cannot spend (= no private keys, same deterministic algorithm if used). Maybe a better term is no-spend copy.

These are orthogonal so you could then annotate each wallet with:

+ Icon 1: showing 'randomness' or 'linkedness'
+ Icon 2: showing unencrypted or encrypted (like the MultiBit beta)
+ icon 3: if observer/ no-spend copy show an appropriate icon

You could reuse the icons between apps so that the user sees the same visual metaphor.

[Carlton Banks]

I prefer "pre-determined". It's an identical concept to deterministic, but I expect it would confuse fewer people. Obvious follow up question for the uninitiated would be "What aspect is pre-determined?". I can't see as many people being confused or put off by the expression.

"pre-determined" sounds terrible.  People would immediately think that there is someone, somewhere, who can recreate a copy of any such wallet.

I don't think deterministic is too technical.

I actually agree.  Deterministic should be fine imho.  But if we really want something less technical,  I like the crystal metaphor.


What about "reproducible"?

I really do disagree. All these 3+ syllable terms are just fine for us here, we have the ability, and more importantly, the inclination to make sense of them. Everyday non-technical types will find it very off-putting. As if there isn't enough convoluted explanations required to help people understand Bitcoin already! And if people don't understand it, they'll either dismiss it or adopt the "watch and wait" attitude. Neither outcome is what anyone here should ideally want. Instead of coming up with the most perfect descriptive terms to satisfy the technical reality, maybe a little pragmatism wouldn't go amiss. We're not going to turn everyone into nerds overnight with our magic bean money, that just won't fly.

tl;dr : grow some mirror neurons!

[casascius]

Are we trying to come up with terms for regular folks or computer folks?  I think the scope of the problem should be defined before really entertaining potential solutions.  If I look at this thread and pretend that we are trying to name a JPEG file, the suggestions sound to me like the following names for a JPEG: "Tri-chromatic quantized raster image".  "Non-palletized discrete cosine color map".   Meanwhile, the rest of the world has settled on calling these "photos", and calling them "JPEG's" where there is any need to make a distinction as to how the picture is encoded.

If I put myself into "regular folks" shoes, there should just be one thing: "bitcoin wallet".  You double click it (just like your e-mail inbox) and there's your bitcoins.  If you received more bitcoins while the wallet was closed, then the computer should think about it for a bit and then the bitcoins appear.  Anything more complicated than that screams "this is for computer experts only".  The Apple computer company has risen to stardom due to their intuitive grasp of this concept, and Microsoft is getting the burial it deserves.

Whether it's deterministic or not shouldn't even be in the regular user's lexicon.  Whether it's random or non-random or whatever, shouldn't be either.  Keep in mind that for the vast majority of users, if you simply tell them that a "bitcoin wallet" has the property of being able to spew out as many receiving addresses as they'll ever need, then they will take that at face value, without needing some sort of adjective qualifying the wallet as having that property.  

From a technical standpoint, what kind of wallet it is should be denoted by the file extension, and the differences between certain kinds of wallets should be assigned certain file extensions (the extensions themselves may or may not stand for anything).

This way, if they need to make a distinction, it might roll off the tongue the easiest by calling it a ".BW3 bitcoin wallet", automatically incorporating by reference the exact nature of the "determinism" and "randomness" inherent in using the wallet, the same way calling a picture a JPEG automatically implies usage of the discrete cosine transform and Huffman encoding without the user having to say or even think about these.

Afterwards, we can say that a ".dat wallet" sucks because (insert list of limitations here), and that for maximum benefit, you should convert it to a .bw3 wallet.  (imagining that a .bw3 wallet has the ability to accept a "JBOK" at the time of creation so payments to old addresses can continue to be received and spent away, but such a wallet will only issue new addresses generated deterministically).

[jim618]

I agree with you the user should just see a wallet.

I wouldn't use the file extension to determine it's properties though.
In bitcoinj/ MultiBit there are various properties actually in the wallet ( version number, various flags etc) that indicate what it is capable of.

Personally I like having an iconography that shows what a wallet is capable of because:
+ humans are visual creatures
+ good icons are international

[etotheipi]

Are we trying to come up with terms for regular folks or computer folks?  I think the scope of the problem should be defined before really entertaining potential solutions.  If I look at this thread and pretend that we are trying to name a JPEG file, the suggestions sound to me like the following names for a JPEG: "Tri-chromatic quantized raster image".  "Non-palletized discrete cosine color map".   Meanwhile, the rest of the world has settled on calling these "photos", and calling them "JPEG's" where there is any need to make a distinction as to how the picture is encoded.

If I put myself into "regular folks" shoes, there should just be one thing: "bitcoin wallet".  You double click it (just like your e-mail inbox) and there's your bitcoins.  Anything more complicated than that screams "this is for computer experts only".  The Apple computer company has risen to stardom due to their intuitive grasp of this concept, and Microsoft is getting the burial it deserves.

Whether it's deterministic or not shouldn't even be in the regular user's lexicon.  Whether it's random or non-random or whatever, shouldn't be either.  Keep in mind that for the vast majority of users, if you simply tell them that a "bitcoin wallet" has the property of being able to spew out as many receiving addresses as they'll ever need, then they will take that at face value, without needing some sort of adjective qualifying the wallet as having that property.  

From a technical standpoint, what kind of wallet it is should be denoted by the file extension, and the differences between certain kinds of wallets should be assigned certain file extensions (the extensions themselves may or may not stand for anything).

This way, if they need to make a distinction, it might roll off the tongue the easiest by calling it a ".BW3 bitcoin wallet", automatically incorporating by reference the exact nature of the "determinism" and "randomness" inherent in using the wallet, the same way calling a picture a JPEG automatically implies usage of the discrete cosine transform and Huffman encoding without the user having to say or even think about these.

I've been battling this question myself.

The important question to ask is "what do users interact with?"  Literally, what do they see on the interface?  They interact with "wallets", of various kinds.  They interact with "transactions" and "labels", and "confirmations", and "transaction amounts".  The names need to start simple, and have a hierarchy that accommodates the various gradations of user education.

You can't just call everything a "wallet" with no qualifiers, because that neglects the profound differences between different kinds of wallets.  For users that use nothing more than "online, maybe-encrypted wallets", using "encrypted" or "unencrypted" is all the qualifier they need.  But once you go beyond "standard" usermode, users have options and need to understand what those options are.  And that's a million times easier if there's consistent names between the applications giving them these options.  Armory uses deterministic wallets, Bitcoin-Qt uses "loose-key" wallets -- the user should care that "loose-key" wallets need to be backed up regularly.  In this sense, anything that will show up on the user interface to the 80th-percentile-and-lower user base, should have simple, unique, fewer-syllables-preferred names. 

Things that only matter to developers, can have as complicated a name as they wanted.  "TxOut trees" are fine because developers aren't actually developers if they're not used to things like that.  And "deterministic wallets" are fine for developers.  But for users, especially ESL and not-so-smart users, we need at least something they can call it, even if they don't understand it.

[Carlton Banks]

Are we trying to come up with terms for regular folks or computer folks?  I think the scope of the problem should be defined before really entertaining potential solutions.  If I look at this thread and pretend that we are trying to name a JPEG file, the suggestions sound to me like the following names for a JPEG: "Tri-chromatic quantized raster image".  "Non-palletized discrete cosine color map".   Meanwhile, the rest of the world has settled on calling these "photos", and calling them "JPEG's" where there is any need to make a distinction as to how the picture is encoded.

More or less how I feel about it too

This way, if they need to make a distinction, it might roll off the tongue the easiest by calling it a ".BW3 bitcoin wallet", automatically incorporating by reference the exact nature of the "determinism" and "randomness" inherent in using the wallet, the same way calling a picture a JPEG automatically implies usage of the discrete cosine transform and Huffman encoding without the user having to say or even think about these.

Afterwards, we can say that a ".dat wallet" sucks because (insert list of limitations here), and that for maximum benefit, you should convert it to a .bw3 wallet.  (imagining that a .bw3 wallet has the ability to accept a "JBOK" at the time of creation so payments to old addresses can continue to be received and spent away, but such a wallet will only issue new addresses generated deterministically).

Now that's a pretty common sense way of dealing with it. File extensions are a great example of computing vernacular that IS accepted by the non-techie crowd, even my folks can distinguish between file extensions and appreciate the bearing they have on the practical use of a computer. They may not have liked it at first (I had a real struggle getting my pop to accept that he need to get this, as well as the hierarchical folder/directory structure concept), but once they do, it becomes an accepted necessity.  

[jim618]

The last posts by Casascius and etotheipi indicate that classifications should be driven by the functional differences (which are important to the user) and not differences in the underlying architecture (which are important to the developer)


Using file extensions I think is a bad idea as they can be changed by the end user.
Thus you are forced have to have something in the file (magic bytes, the flags I mentioned) in addition to check the structure.
Just call it a ".wallet".

[DeathAndTaxes]

I think some of these distinctions are academic.  The reality is Bitcoin isn't ready for primetime.  I have long believe (that dozens of other revolutionary technology) we are on a decade long timeline to mainstream usage.

random vs deterministic - nobody will care.  By the time Bitcoin becomes mainstream 99.99999999% of wallets will be deterministic.   It would be like classifying computers are binary or trinary.  Who asks if their Dell laptop is a binary computer?  Who worries that the flash game might not work unless they can verify it wasn't written for trinary based machine language? Nobody.  Except for extremely small niches (by technically savy professionals) all wallets will be deterministic.  The risk of losing funds due to out of date or corrupted backup is simply too high for random wallets.  They will fall out of favor like floppy disks.

encrypted vs plaintext "I want to be robbed because I have too much money" - once again nobody will care.  This is money we are talking about.  The fact that there are wallets which are incapable of encryption simply shows Bitcoin isn't ready for primetime.  I would hope and pray this oversight will be long since corrected before Bitcoin becomes even close to mainstream.  Also encrypted is not understand by most people.   "Password protection to keep your funds safe" = sufficient for mainstream users.

Many of the rest of the terms aren't "wallets" they are "features of a wallet".  

watching wallet?  No such thing.  It is simply confusing.  A wallet is something you use to hold money/value.  It would be like calling an ATM receipt a watching "wallet".   Someone up thread nailed it.   There is no such thing as a watching wallet; there are "wallet watchers"!.  It isn't a type of wallet it is a tool, utility, feature of a wallet (or maybe someday ALL wallets).

linked wallet?   Most people will simply see this as a "double key/login/authorization" and understand it is for security.  They won't want to even begin to understand how the phone is actually part of the wallet and the keys from both the wallet and phone need to be both used to produce the valid multi-sig transactions ..... ZZZZZZ ..... ZZZZZ ..... ZZZZ.  Using terminology that users already understand like 2FA or even more simplistically something like "asks for confirmation from your phone".

" .... for even more security xyz wallet will get confirmation of all spending right from your mobile phone.  See this video demo.  [demo of guy spending 100 BTC on his laptop then getting a security confirmation on his phone to authorize or deny]

TL/DR nerds like to classify things, users like to see FEATURES.

Example of a wallet advertisement circa 2020
xyz wallet supports ...
* password protection to keep your funds safe.
* ability to print your own money from any inkjet or laser printer (offline paper key generation and auto transfer).
* supports usb PIN pad to defeat malware and hackers.
* approve or deny all transactions right from your phone.
* daily spending limits.
* remote wallet monitoring ... great for parents.
* optional bitcoin escrow & recovery system (never lose funds again).

[casascius]

I've been battling this question myself.

The important question to ask is "what do users interact with?"  Literally, what do they see on the interface?  They interact with "wallets", of various kinds.  They interact with "transactions" and "labels", and "confirmations", and "transaction amounts".  The names need to start simple, and have a hierarchy that accommodates the various gradations of user education.

Let me compare it to iTunes.  What would a user say he interacts with?

Would a user say he interacts with "media" and "metadata" and "album art" and "playlists"?

Or would he say he uses iTunes to listen to his music, and to organize it, and load up his iPod?

The moment we decide that the user even needs to know he is "interacting with a label", the resulting software is no longer speaking his language.

I submit that the user should be able to use the software without needing to name anything.

You can't just call everything a "wallet" with no qualifiers, because that neglects the profound differences between different kinds of wallets.

Let me compare it to vehicles.  What if I told you you can't just call everything a "vehicle" with no qualifiers, because that neglects the profound differences between cars, buses, trucks, and trains?  Not to mention airplanes?

On the other hand, if I say "vehicle" to you, you probably think of a car.  This is probably because cars are the most popular kind of vehicle that you and everybody you know interacts with.

When deterministic wallets are the norm, the word "wallet" may as well mean one.

For users that use nothing more than "online, maybe-encrypted wallets", using "encrypted" or "unencrypted" is all the qualifier they need.

If I sent you a PDF file and it needed a password, and I called it a "password-protected PDF", you would get it.  So would the average user.  So this is entirely acceptable as a qualifier.

The most important thing here is it is a distinction that is meaningful to the user.  100% of users will care if a password is needed, since it's instrumental to their ability to use the file.

But once you go beyond "standard" usermode, users have options and need to understand what those options are.  And that's a million times easier if there's consistent names between the applications giving them these options.  Armory uses deterministic wallets, Bitcoin-Qt uses "loose-key" wallets -- the user should care that "loose-key" wallets need to be backed up regularly.  In this sense, anything that will show up on the user interface to the 80th-percentile-and-lower user base, should have simple, unique, fewer-syllables-preferred names.  

The average user would be satisfied calling it a ".dat wallet", a ".bw3 wallet", or whatever.

If the user has to stop and ask "wtf is a loose key wallet", you've lost his mind share.  99% of people never ask what does "MP3" stand for, this doesn't stop them from using their iPod.

I would strongly suggest that different kinds of wallets be given names that have no words in them, and leave the job of explaining the technical differences to the documentation.

I accept .wallet as a good extension, but this should be reserved for a wallet type that is a) standardized, b) well accepted by the community, c) has all of the important features we have determined that wallets should have.  At the very least, a user should be able to expect that wallets saved by any application that creates .wallet files can also be read by any future application that reads .wallet files.

[casascius]

Using file extensions I think is a bad idea as they can be changed by the end user.
Thus you are forced have to have something in the file (magic bytes, the flags I mentioned) in addition to check the structure.
Just call it a ".wallet".

I agree on both counts: the software should sense the file type through magic bytes, and the file extension is for the benefit of the user.

This is already pretty common practice and is something I'd assume we'd imitate.  (try renaming a .jpg to .gif, and notice that many things will still open it because they see the magic bytes... the extension simply helped the OS's shell pick the appropriate program to open the file)

[SgtSpike]

I like most of the naming, but pointed out a few that I thought could use changes.

A) Completely disagree with "Online Wallet".  If you're truly trying to make this noob-friendly, then don't use the word "online" with anything that isn't web-based.  When you say "Online Wallet", the first thing people will (generally speaking) think of is a wallet hosted at a website.  I think "Hot Wallet" is the best terminology to use here, though it is still a bit on the geeky side.  Maybe "Live Wallet"?

D1) Call it "Read-only wallet".  People already understand what Read Only means, may as well take advantage of that phrasing for the Bitcoin counterpart.

D2) "Unlocked wallet" is the best noob-friendly term I can come up with.  "Full Wallet" is a vague description and conjures up zero images as to the usage of said wallet to a newbie.

E1) I do like "Chained Wallet", but I think "Seed Wallet" might do a decent job as well.  More and more people know what a computer seed means (from games, random number generators, whatever), so I think it might be good to piggyback on that naming convention.

H) "Proposed Transaction". Simple terms that still do a decent job of explaining what the object is.

I) "Proposed Transaction ID"

[Carlton Banks]

Ultimately, if major adoption takes off, the type of language that the average user can use and understand might not be that easy to second guess. It's an experiment in collective consciousness of sorts, and just like paradigm shifts of the past, the world will suddenly end up with a few new concepts with words to describe them in it's parlance. As there is a necessary amount of learning to do, regardless of whether someone takes to using the more technical expressions or not, we can be pretty certain that some new expressions will become part of the mainstream. All we can really do is thrash out some sensible ideas. But what sticks will not be decided in this thread! Still a useful bit of brainstorming though, as if we can come up with something truly simple and meaningful with universal comprehension, then I think we'll have done a good job. We still won't be able to get people to use the expressions we come up with though, they're (collectively) in charge of that! 

[etotheipi]

I think some of these distinctions are academic.  The reality is Bitcoin isn't ready for primetime.  I have long believe (that dozens of other revolutionary technology) we are on a decade long timeline to mainstream usage.

random vs deterministic - nobody will care...

...

This thread isn't about how to make Bitcoin go primetime, or how to best market it to new users.  It's about creating a common language for people that need that language.  Many of these terms may be relics of the past one day, and many of them may never be seen by, or cared about, by grandma.  But there's still plenty of users who need that language, because they're dealing with these things.  Right now.  And a lot of these potential users are people who will help build the foundation of Bitcoin's future.

My goal with this thread is to make sure there's a friendly, coherent landscape for the users of the system, right now.  Just because certain things may be relics of the past doesn't mean that we don't need to be intelligent about naming these things.  The current user base is more advanced, more technical than the average person using text-message.  But so is the current Bitcoin software.  And if there are options for it, we need to at least make it as easy as possible for them to understand it.  When Bitcoin is ready for primetime, I'll let the marketers figure out what to call these things, and what features users want.

I'm someone who is constantly bombarded by users asking what the hell each feature is.  How do I do this?  Is this feature the same as that?  Does it work the same in both this program and that?  While the Bitcoin world consists of complicated options, we need a language to talk about it.  You're talking more about how we'll market these things in the future, and how to choose which options are best for the user.  I'm talking about right now, even while Bitcoin is still manual-transmission...

[fornit]

to all those advocating observer wallets, read-only wallets, no-spend wallets etc:

imho, a good name communicates as much correct concepts as possible and few or none misleading ones. the term "wallet" is already a compromise, emphasizing "you can spend bitcoins with this" but omitting the fact that its not containing money, but permissions. "key collection" would be a different compromise.
so, when you call a thing you cannot spend bitcoins from a wallet, you use it for something that lacks exactly the one concept that made "wallet" a useful word in the first place. the term is completely void of correct concepts. yes, under the hood it looks a lot like a wallet file. in terms of functionality, it has as much to do with with a real life leather wallet as a dolphin or a fruit juice.

[etotheipi]

to all those advocating observer wallets, read-only wallets, no-spend wallets etc:

imho, a good name communicates as much correct concepts as possible and few or none misleading ones. the term "wallet" is already a compromise, emphasizing "you can spend bitcoins with this" but omitting the fact that its not containing money, but permissions. "key collection" would be a different compromise.
so, when you call a thing you cannot spend bitcoins from a wallet, you use it for something that lacks exactly the one concept that made "wallet" a useful word in the first place. the term is completely void of correct concepts. yes, under the hood it looks a lot like a wallet file. in terms of functionality, it has as much to do with with a real life leather wallet as a dolphin or a fruit juice.

I think your point is dwelling too much on the literal meaning of "wallet", without acknowledging that many things in life, especially in tech, are named after things that they only approximately represent.  I think "wallet" is a perfect euphamism for "key collection that lets you receive and send money"

But you bring up a point that I like:  the "Observer Wallet" doesn't have to be a "wallet".  It could be more like a "collection box" or a "drop slot", etc.  The only problem with that is that it still behaves much like a "wallet", and it's definitely more convenient to bundle it on the list of "wallets" like Armory does.  And, I don't think it's incorrect at all to call it a "wallet" with an appropriate modifier, but you're right it doesn't have to be...

EDIT:  Actually, I'm not so sure I agree with not calling it a wallet.  An "observer wallet" is nearly identical to other wallets, it just happens to be missing one operation.  Users will use it exactly the same way.  And especially for savings wallets, their interactions with it may be 99% the same as a "regular" wallet.