Moving forward with Armory

[goatpig]

I read up about GPL vs MIT. Before, I didn't know the details. Goatpig, I applaud you for your strong stance on this topic. "Just" GPL would surely be easier now, but I see your point in being "radically open source" here.
It's an interesting (off topic) discussion point, I personally am unsure what the right way is, generally, on different open source licenses.

I'm not all that versed in licenses either. GPL has proved its limits though, and something permissive like MIT or OpenLDAP is the only way forward imo.

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[coins101]

The licensing and trademark are two district issues.  You need to keep the Armory name in the licence, but you need to stop using the name in public to refer to your project, unless the officers of Armory give you written permission to use the name.

There are talks of giving me a renewable license to use the trademark. I'll be meeting with Alan in person on Monday and go from there.

I agree to drop the Armory name. This might keep you from bigger problems in the future, and might even give you a slighty better position should all of the old Armory folks come to a round table at a later point. This is a sad moment, with the Armory company structure and dev team being in pieces, so why not take the opportunity to get rid of as much potential ballast as possible.

I have several reasons to keep on using the Armory name:

1) Armory has brand name recognition. If I uphold that trademark to the standard it has been so far, the IP retains far more value. This keeps the door open for one day getting a new acquirer, and this could all conclude in reviving Armory as a business and getting the team back together. All devs stuck around with no pay for 6 months, my response to that can't be to just shut down all hope by leaving the trademark to decay.

2) The brand name recognition is beneficial to me too. People on this forum know I've been an active developer of Armory for some 2 years now. They know what I've done and where my skills lie. People outside this forum don't. As an example, while Alan is getting flooded with job offers, I ain't getting snuff. Not that I am complaining. I want to work on Armory anyways, but this is a clear picture of what awaited me had I decided to go job hunting right away instead.

There are several ways for a developer to make a living working on an open source project. It doesn't have to come down to donations. But for the other ways to work, I need my name out there with some achievement behind it if I want these other opportunities to materialize. As far as the Bitcoin business space is concerned, Armory is all Alan. I'll have to change to that if I want to have my cake and eat it to. Doing all that development under the Armory name and demonstrating I can take over where Alan left is beneficial to me as well. I have to look out for myself too.

3) The naming omg... what's the current flavor? Slap some random word on top of wallet and you're done? Or just go with something completely unrelated? What is this, hashtag rap? Who's up for MtnDewWallet? Or what about just Bicycle? If push comes to shove, I will have to change the name, but we aren't there yet. And I dread that time if ever it comes.

4) I don't want someone else to use the name. The share holders benefit from letting me use the trademark. If I was to drop it, they could very well just sell the trademark while the IP entanglement is being dealt with. Then what? Do you want to envision a future where the Armory brand name is bought by a web wallet provider?

5) There are still a lot of individual users and businesses that use and recommend Armory. I don't want to disappoint them, and in the case of businesses, I don't want to harm their image by letting the Armory name they rely upon decay into obsolescence. The image has been harmed enough as it is.

6) I'm a romantic, I don't want to see Armory die, even in name.

7) If I have to change the name, I'd rather do it later, once I have demonstrated my ability to keep the project alive.

Fuck it. Let's put something together and buy the company, the IP or some variant.  It's currently moribund, with no serious way forward, that I can tell.

[Ente]

Fuck it. Let's put something together and buy the company, the IP or some variant.  It's currently moribund, with no serious way forward, that I can tell.

Funny, I had the same brief thought. Let's just buy what we want. Can't be that expensive, in its current situation? :-)

No, I think that money would be wasted. If we need to spend money, let's pay dev(s) to actually bring Armory forward, instead of paying entities which brought this situation upon us.
Also, there's absolutely no hurry. We have 0.93 as a base to use now and to continue developing, and we have Goatpig. And a whole forum full of fans! That's all we need for this party! :-)

Ente

[achow101]

I can't remove references to ATI, that would break the AGPL licensing terms as well as trademark law (as long as the project uses the Armory name).

Not in the credits or licensing, but places where things to ATI are referenced like where it says to review ATI privacy policy and any links to the ATI website and such should be removed before the next release.

If the Armory name is dropped and another is chosen, the logo will also have to be changed as well.

[goatpig]

Not in the credits or licensing, but places where things to ATI are referenced like where it says to review ATI privacy policy and any links to the ATI website and such should be removed before the next release.

Ugh, right I have to go over that stuff at some point. I made a branch off of master named CleanUpATI. I'll greatly appreciate any PRs to help me clean up the references, links and what not on this branch.

Fuck it. Let's put something together and buy the company, the IP or some variant.  It's currently moribund, with no serious way forward, that I can tell.

Let's take it easy for now. I may just get the right to use the trademark. Let's figure things out after I know where that stands. This is marathon, not a sprint, no need to rush.

Funny, I had the same brief thought. Let's just buy what we want. Can't be that expensive, in its current situation? :-)

I expect you'd be surprised.

---------------------------------

Generally speaking, when it comes down to soliciting the community for money for any purposes, let's not go down that path yet. Give me time to come up with a release and get things settled. This way I can prove myself as a proper successor and build some trust around the project again. Otherwise I could just as well ask for a donation round right now, do not contribute any code, do another round 2 months down the road with whatever good will I have left, to eventually run away with the $$$. Trust takes time to nurture, and again there is no need to rush.

[sandal]

My only real concern:
Will there be a point where the coins I have in armory will be unmoveable?

Do I need to use a different wallet for the time being?

[goatpig]

My only real concern:
Will there be a point where the coins I have in armory will be unmoveable?

Do I need to use a different wallet for the time being?

0.93.3 is fine for at least another couple years.

[gangtraet]

0.93.3 is fine for at least another couple years.

Maybe not fine, but certainly safe.  If unmaintained, it is only a matter of time before it can no longer send money unaided, after some soft or hardfork has made it necessary to update bitcoin core to a version Armory cannot communicate with.  But in that case, you can always export the private keys and import them in another wallet.

Of  course after a few years you may need to dig out an old linux distribution and run it in a VM to even run Armory, but while tedious I cannot see how that could stop working. 

I am not worried yet.  But of course I am considering other options (electrum) if goatpig does not succeed in carrying on the torch.

[goatpig]

0.93.3 is fine for at least another couple years.

Maybe not fine, but certainly safe.  If unmaintained, it is only a matter of time before it can no longer send money unaided, after some soft or hardfork has made it necessary to update bitcoin core to a version Armory cannot communicate with.  But in that case, you can always export the private keys and import them in another wallet.

Of  course after a few years you may need to dig out an old linux distribution and run it in a VM to even run Armory, but while tedious I cannot see how that could stop working. 

I am not worried yet.  But of course I am considering other options (electrum) if goatpig does not succeed in carrying on the torch.

Unless ECC, SHA256 or AES is broken in the future, Armory is safe indeed. And the internet as a whole would be in a lot more trouble than just Armory if that were to happen.

When I said fine I meant fine with regards to Armory's reliance upon a local Bitcoin node. 0.93.3 can't make sense of SegWit transactions, it will just ignore them. It can still spend coins that are not "SW'd". There would an issue in receiving SW transactions, but the idea here is to move coins out, not use the wallet for actual trading.

Generally, if you used Armory in the past for your cold storage, you can expect to be able to spend those coins with Armory as long as no hard fork has been deployed modifying the legacy Bitcoin transaction rules. If the changes are done through a soft fork though, you should be able to spend just fine. I don't personally expect the network will go through a hard fork that would break old style Bitcoin transactions for next 2-3 years. There are plenty talks of hard forks lately, but I don't believe any of those are meant to change on chain transaction structure. I could be wrong though, but again, I expect the network to prefer soft forks whenever possible.

Anti malleability changes like lowS would reduce Armory's usability, but with some persistence, it would eventually create a valid transaction. Block size hard forks are irrelevant to Armory, but changing magic word within the block files would break it. However, fixing that is a matter of changing one hard coded line within 0.93, nothing too dramatic.

Changes to the raw block data saving formats will stop Armory. So far, changes of that category are pruning and obfuscation. Both these features can be disabled and if you find yourself 5 years from now trying to spend old coins with 0.93, you should be disabling that stuff anyways.

As for running the binary, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to build from source on a Debian distro 5 years from now.

[sandal]

My only real concern:
Will there be a point where the coins I have in armory will be unmoveable?

Do I need to use a different wallet for the time being?

0.93.3 is fine for at least another couple years.

Great to hear.

Thank you, goatpig!!

[solitude]

My only real concern:
Will there be a point where the coins I have in armory will be unmoveable?

Do I need to use a different wallet for the time being?

0.93.3 is fine for at least another couple years.

Funny how bitcoinarmory.com lists 0.93.2 as the latest release for ages now.

[achow101]

My only real concern:
Will there be a point where the coins I have in armory will be unmoveable?

Do I need to use a different wallet for the time being?

0.93.3 is fine for at least another couple years.

Funny how bitcoinarmory.com lists 0.93.2 as the latest release for ages now.

Since ATI has been having problems and since ATI is no longer maintaining armory, it is not surprising that that site lists 0.93.2 as the latest. Since goatpig doesn't have access to that site, it is now longer the official site of Armory, we will need to get a new website instead.

[solitude]

How should I go about transferring my bitcoins from Armory to Trezor/Electrum?  Do I have to create a new address and send the bitcoins to that trezor address?

[BitcoinNewsMagazine]

How should I go about transferring my bitcoins from Armory to Trezor/Electrum?  Do I have to create a new address and send the bitcoins to that trezor address?

If you are using Trezor with their online wallet myTrezor.com just send your bitcoin from Armory to a receiving address in myTrezor.com. If you prefer to use Trezor with Electrum you will need to download Electrum-2.5.4. I like to use the portable version because you keep all data confined to one folder. Just make a folder called Electrum and put Electrum-2.5.4 in the folder. Plug in your Trezor and start Electrum, when prompted check create new wallet, hardware wallet then Trezor. Pick a receiving address to send to. Which ever method you choose do a small test transaction first until you are comfortable. If you are completely new to Trezor browse the user manual first. Remember Trezor must be initialized before you can use it with myTrezor.com or Electrum.

[achow101]

For CleanUpATI, what should we be replacing Armory Technologies Inc with? Also, what about links to the armory website? Since Armory's support infrastructure requires sending things to a server, where should those things (e.g. bug reports) go?

[goatpig]

For CleanUpATI, what should we be replacing Armory Technologies Inc with?

For now, nothing. Copyrights are in code files and the license file that should be bundled with every release. I don't believe there is a need to replace anything, just prune stuff out.

Also, what about links to the armory website? Since Armory's support infrastructure requires sending things to a server, where should those things (e.g. bug reports) go?

Nowhere. I'm getting rid of all phone home code in Armory for my upcoming release. I'll reevaluate each of them in a case per case basis once I have time.

[solitude]

Can anyone give me one good reason to stick with Armory?

How can we rely on one single dev (goatpig) to further development?

He's already stated he won't continue development if the money isn't there.  I'm not sure how much he's expecting to receive, but I'm guessing the money (won't) be there with so many free bitcoin client alternatives.

[achow101]

For now, nothing. Copyrights are in code files and the license file that should be bundled with every release. I don't believe there is a need to replace anything, just prune stuff out.

--snip--

Nowhere. I'm getting rid of all phone home code in Armory for my upcoming release. I'll reevaluate each of them in a case per case basis once I have time.

So basically remove/comment out any mention of ATI and the website except in the credits.

Can anyone give me one good reason to stick with Armory?

Armory is still one of the best and most secure clients or there. At this time, there is nothing that makes it obsolete and it still works very well. Just because ATI stopped working on it doesn't mean that the latest version is suddenly not usable.

How can we rely on one single dev (goatpig) to further development?

We can't and won't. Given some time, I'm sure that other developers will come out and help out with the project. Not every project has a team to begin with, the team comes with time.

Besides, he isn't the only developer, I'm also helping out and contributing.

He's already stated he won't continue development if the money isn't there.  I'm not sure how much he's expecting to receive, but I'm guessing the money (won't) be there with so many free bitcoin client alternatives.

He didn't say that development would stop, it would just slow down. It is kind of hard to develop full time on a project of you need to get a real job for money to actually live, and that is what will happen if there isn't money. Currently goatpig is unemployed.

[Bonez0r]

I don't know what form of crowdfunding you want to use, something like kickstarter maybe? An alternative that i don't think was suggested yet is Patreon. Instead of collecting a one-time funding, people can "subscribe" to your patreon and pay an amount either per month or per completed product.

There was an attempt to have it acquired by another company in order to keep funding development, but the time cost of such an acquisition got the best us. Simply put it takes too long to get things right and resume operations in a way that satisfies all parties involved. In the mean time, people aren't getting paid and they eventually run out of resources.

If time is the only problem, could crowdfunding be used to pay you while you make arrangements with said parties? Say $10K-$20K to buy you time?

[goatpig]

How can we rely on one single dev (goatpig) to further development?

Alan has developed Armory alone for the first 2 years of the project.

He's already stated he won't continue development if the money isn't there.  I'm not sure how much he's expecting to receive, but I'm guessing the money (won't) be there with so many free bitcoin client alternatives.

You misread. I'll invite you to go over the post again. My position is no dinero, no full time. I'll have to find a job to eat if the community doesn't pay for my day to day living. But that's some months down the road. My involvement in the project was never in question. And as I said elsewhere, this is up in the air still. There are other ways for open source devs to make a living.

EDIT:

I don't know what form of crowdfunding you want to use, something like kickstarter maybe? An alternative that i don't think was suggested yet is Patreon. Instead of collecting a one-time funding, people can "subscribe" to your patreon and pay an amount either per month or per completed product.

Someone pointed me to gitmoney.io. Looks interesting (get paid per commit) and it opens the room for other devs to get paid to work on the code. I'll review all options if it ever comes down to that.

The community is at liberty to setup something without consulting me to finance development (to pay me or other developers). I won't turn down PRs if they're up to par. If I end up turning the PRs down, you are always welcomed to fork the repo and forward your version there. This the open source world, it's all a matter of how much you want to get involved.

I would suggest you let me come up with 0.94 before exploring anything of that nature.