Bitcoin core software on smartphone

[Loraxglorax54]

Has anyone gotten this to work? Couldn't figure it out.

[moodcrawler]

Can you imagine a PDA running a bitcoin software? I mean, did a software like this ever existed?
Or maybe for a Blackberry?
Just asking:)

[MyBTT]

It's possible, however impractical. You really don't want to store 100+gb of the blockchain on your phone. Just use an spv client like Mycelium.

[8xbt.com]

Others like the mycelium wallet, do we really controlling the bitcoins?

Yes.  As long as you properly secure access to your wallet and your backups, you are really controlling your bitcoins with wallets such as Mycelium, Electrum, Multibit, Armory, etc.

That means if mycelium collapse like mtgox and bitfinex, we will not lose our bitcoins?

Correct.

For mycelium, I only know how to 'login' using the 12 words mnemonic, or just create a new wallet every time I use, but don't know the technical things to deal with the keys.

The 12 word mnemonic is a seed that is used by the wallet to generate all the necessary keys.  If someone gains access to the data stored by Mycellium on your phone (virus, malware, steals your phone and password, etc), they can take your bitcoins.  If someone gains access to your 12 word mnemonic then they can take your bitcoins.







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I am not doubting Mycelium's credibility, but are there any ways for Mycelium to know your 12 words mnemonic when generating it? After all the mnemonic is generated by their app, there can be some backdoors in their app, or some vulnerabilities in it. One day they may get 'hacked', and the mnemonic 'leaked'.

8xbt.com

[ranochigo]

Others like the mycelium wallet, do we really controlling the bitcoins?

Yes.  As long as you properly secure access to your wallet and your backups, you are really controlling your bitcoins with wallets such as Mycelium, Electrum, Multibit, Armory, etc.

That means if mycelium collapse like mtgox and bitfinex, we will not lose our bitcoins?

Correct.

For mycelium, I only know how to 'login' using the 12 words mnemonic, or just create a new wallet every time I use, but don't know the technical things to deal with the keys.

The 12 word mnemonic is a seed that is used by the wallet to generate all the necessary keys.  If someone gains access to the data stored by Mycellium on your phone (virus, malware, steals your phone and password, etc), they can take your bitcoins.  If someone gains access to your 12 word mnemonic then they can take your bitcoins.

I am not doubting Mycelium's credibility, but are there any ways for Mycelium to know your 12 words mnemonic when generating it? After all the mnemonic is generated by their app, there can be some backdoors in their app, or some vulnerabilities in it. One day they may get 'hacked', and the mnemonic 'leaked'.

8xbt.com

Yes. Mycelium can insert a backdoor in which they transmit the information to their own server after the user generates the seed. There is also a possibility that they have a predetermined list where the seed is generated, weakening the randomness of the seed.

This can happen to every Bitcoin wallet. That's why they are open sourced. Users can verify the source code and ensure that no suspicious or malicious codes are added in. They can compile it themselves and ensure that there is no backdoors. As far as I can tell, Mycelium is relatively safe.

[8xbt.com]

Others like the mycelium wallet, do we really controlling the bitcoins?

Yes.  As long as you properly secure access to your wallet and your backups, you are really controlling your bitcoins with wallets such as Mycelium, Electrum, Multibit, Armory, etc.

That means if mycelium collapse like mtgox and bitfinex, we will not lose our bitcoins?

Correct.

For mycelium, I only know how to 'login' using the 12 words mnemonic, or just create a new wallet every time I use, but don't know the technical things to deal with the keys.

The 12 word mnemonic is a seed that is used by the wallet to generate all the necessary keys.  If someone gains access to the data stored by Mycellium on your phone (virus, malware, steals your phone and password, etc), they can take your bitcoins.  If someone gains access to your 12 word mnemonic then they can take your bitcoins.

I am not doubting Mycelium's credibility, but are there any ways for Mycelium to know your 12 words mnemonic when generating it? After all the mnemonic is generated by their app, there can be some backdoors in their app, or some vulnerabilities in it. One day they may get 'hacked', and the mnemonic 'leaked'.

8xbt.com

Yes. Mycelium can insert a backdoor in which they transmit the information to their own server after the user generates the seed. There is also a possibility that they have a predetermined list where the seed is generated, weakening the randomness of the seed.

This can happen to every Bitcoin wallet. That's why they are open sourced. Users can verify the source code and ensure that no suspicious or malicious codes are added in. They can compile it themselves and ensure that there is no backdoors. As far as I can tell, Mycelium is relatively safe.

So, why we are 100% controlling the bitcoin when using Mycelium, when comparing with bitcoin core?

[achow101]

So, why we are 100% controlling the bitcoin when using Mycelium, when comparing with bitcoin core?

Both wallets mean that you are 100% in control of your Bitcoin because the private keys are in your possession. The "vulnerability" is just that the developers could in theory insert a backdoor, but this can happen with any wallet.

[8xbt.com]

So, why we are 100% controlling the bitcoin when using Mycelium, when comparing with bitcoin core?

Both wallets mean that you are 100% in control of your Bitcoin because the private keys are in your possession. The "vulnerability" is just that the developers could in theory insert a backdoor, but this can happen with any wallet.

How to deal with the private key in Mycelium? Are there any details instruction?

[achow101]

So, why we are 100% controlling the bitcoin when using Mycelium, when comparing with bitcoin core?

Both wallets mean that you are 100% in control of your Bitcoin because the private keys are in your possession. The "vulnerability" is just that the developers could in theory insert a backdoor, but this can happen with any wallet.

How to deal with the private key in Mycelium? Are there any details instruction?

They are all handled internally by the wallet. You do not need to worry about that.

[ranochigo]

So, why we are 100% controlling the bitcoin when using Mycelium, when comparing with bitcoin core?

Both wallets mean that you are 100% in control of your Bitcoin because the private keys are in your possession. The "vulnerability" is just that the developers could in theory insert a backdoor, but this can happen with any wallet.

How to deal with the private key in Mycelium? Are there any details instruction?

Mycelium uses BIP39[1] seeds to generate addresses. This means that the addresses are all generated from the seeds and hence, the user only need to have the seed and all their address can be recovered through that. Even though you can extract the private keys from the seed by using their BIP39 deviation path, I won't recommend this.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

[TransaDox]

Yes it is possible. There are some considerations, though.

Currently to sync to the network, 10s of GB (80?) of disk space is required for a full node (soon to be >100 GB). I will not discuss SPVs here since they are a poor solution relying on trusted 3rd parties.

The actual space consumed is not so much of an issue (I'm not talking about Moores Law that the hard of thinking espouse, either) but the 10s of GBs do still need to be downloaded even if not stored. Many mobile packages (99% in my country) limit the bandwidth to a couple of GB per month so it becomes almost impossible to sync. Unlimited bandwidth mobile packages are required and these are like rocking horse droppings and far from cheap.

Assuming that one has already synchronised, then things become easier. A block is created approximately every 10 minutes and is about 1MB. That's about 144MB per day (~4.3 GB per month). Still. These plans are quite expensive and if one is also an avid Youtube watcher then you will have problems. If the block size is increased then the required bandwidth will also increase accordingly so uncapped, "always on" connections are a requisite.

Battery consumption is also a consideration but most people have been conditioned to accept poor battery life so it may be a non-issue. This could be alleviated to some extent by slight behavioural  changes to the mempool or smart burst management when not charging while fully engaging when charging. This aspect is not well understood at present since the community is dismissive of mobile platforms and I know of very little research in this direction. The worst case scenario is that you have to keep the mobile device plugged in permanently although I expect several hours of untethered operation is more than achievable with careful app management and changes to the core software.

So the hard limitation is the mobile bandwidth of the packages. If one has an uncapped, "always-on" mobile package then there is no reason a mobile platform cannot be used but some of the current operating aspects would need to change to make is usable by Joe Public.

[sasha456]

How about the safety of Bitcoin in this case? I'm always thinking  about the safety.

[belcher]

I was talking to shinobimonkey about this, he's been doing it for 12 months now.

He uses Samsung edge 6. Initial synchronization took him about a week with him leaving it on charger as much as possible. He sync'd at around block height 450000 (so about January 2017), and both blocksonly and pruning are enabled. He says he used a version of bitcoin core 0.14 or thereabouts. The ABCore GUI has an option to only allow sync'ing when on wifi and charging.

I'm actually impressed how near-possible it is to be running a practical smartphone full node today.

Smartphone full nodes will be important going ahead because smartphone usage has already outpaced desktop for some use cases (e.g. web browsing) and is only going up from here.

[jargal]

Yes it's possible and it already exists. You can perform a search for 'ABcore' by Greenaddress. It supports running a lightweight Bitcoin core full node on your powerful mobile devices. It has been compiled using dependencies from Arch linux and works on both x86 as well as x64 bit android devices. You'll however require a powerful smartphone with a fast processor and something with large amounts of RAM (about 3 GB)

It is actually a great thing if it already exists, to have a cold wallet in your smartphone to always keep your coins with you wherever you go, without any worries at all.

What is the relation between Bitcoin core on a mobile device and a cold wallet?

[arlinxoha]

Yes, of course, I think the Bitcoin Core software will continue in the future. It will not be too late to get started. It can be seen in a few years, but I think that Bitcoin's dominance is really big. This is really a great thing. Thereby, there will be a cool wallet on your smartphone.

[superresistant]

 
It could work. The way I see it is :
 - create an Android VM that has enough size (GB) to synchronize and store all the blockchain
 - prune the blockchain to a size that your phone can handle
 - make a copy of the system and paste it onto your phone
 - have a wifi connection to sync your phone and have it plugged when syncing