Armory Monotization Idea

[mandelbert]

I have been using armory for a long time and I love that fact that my wallet is generated from a seed which I only need to back up once.

However, the seed obviously does not contain any data about the transactions I made. If my computer will crash, I will lose all the comments I wrote on my transactions. For example, "Paying $500 for a GPU" will be gone, and I'll be left wondering what did I spend 2 bitcoins on.

To solve that, I backup my wallet after every transaction, which kind of defeats the purpose.

So here is my idea: have armory automatically back up encrypted transaction comments to a centralized server. I'll be happy to pay, say $1 or $2 per month for this service, and if a couple 1000s armory users choose this, it can generate some income to the maintainers.

To clarify:

 * No wallet keys are ever sent, so it is impossible to steal funds from the backups.
 * The comments should be encrypted by a client side key (perhaps derived from the wallet seed?), so even the server cannot decrypt them.
 * The data the server needs to store is very small, only comments and some ids, so something like Amazon's S3 can be used very cheaply.
 * It can be nicely integrated into armory so backup happens automatically and restore is user friendly.
 * Payment for this service can also, obviously, be nicely integrated into armory. It's a wallet after all

What do you think?

[1714794615]

1714794615

[1714794615]

1714794615

[1714794615]

1714794615

[1714794615]

1714794615

[1714794615]

1714794615

[1714794615]

1714794615

[Carlton Banks]

It depends alot on the code and the project it would entail... If the system took alot of development effort without much reward, developers might not find it motivating enough. On the other hand, if the same basic principle could be re-used elsewhere, maybe that would be less of an obstacle.

Care would need to be taken with the data also, probably better to not include the amount and to use a different identifier for the comments than the Bitcoin txid, which is publicly available information. That way, any deciphering bug or leak from the client would be somewhat damage mitigated, as trying to cross-reference public blockchain entries would be fairly fruitless.

I would consider using a service like that..... but carefully. And I agree that others might see value in it too.

[goatpig]

Under ATI, this was in the tubes to synchronize several instances of Armory across machines.

I won't be doing this because

1) It acts as phone home code, and there won't be any of that under my watch.

2) This is over engineered if the only thing you want is to back up your wallets meta data. I plan to add a feature to extract meta data with the new wallets

3) If there is demand for this, I would consider adding a feature to the DB to distribute WO wallets and/or meta data to authenticated instances. This would keep all data under your control, but add remote sync'ing for deployment convenience.

4) I don't intent to monetize any feature in the main Armory client.

[Carlton Banks]

goatpig's 3rd point describes a much better way of achieving a similar result (and it would also be more secure).

I was going to post yesterday that such a comments server protocol could be decentralised if it could make use of distributed storage platforms (MaidSafe, StorJ etc). But not only is p2p Armory clients comment serving a better plan, but much less complicated also. Colour me interested.

[Ente]

Under ATI, this was in the tubes to synchronize several instances of Armory across machines.

I won't be doing this because

1) It acts as phone home code, and there won't be any of that under my watch.

2) This is over engineered if the only thing you want is to back up your wallets meta data. I plan to add a feature to extract meta data with the new wallets

3) If there is demand for this, I would consider adding a feature to the DB to distribute WO wallets and/or meta data to authenticated instances. This would keep all data under your control, but add remote sync'ing for deployment convenience.

4) I don't intent to monetize any feature in the main Armory client.

I like your straight motives and straight language!
No buzzwords, no mumbo-jumbo, no compromises for the user.

(I remember the outcry ages ago when someone found some phone-home code in the old ATI armory..)

Ente