Bitcoin Wallet 3.0 available!

[Andreas Schildbach]

I'm proud to announce version 3.0 of Bitcoin Wallet.

The changes are massive:

• Now requires Gingerbread (Android 2.3.3) or later.
• Export/import encrypted private key backups to/from mail or online storage.
• Switch to new block store format, uses seriously less internal storage and doesn't grow.
• New installs are instantly fully updated and useable.
• Got rid of block chain snapshot in APK, installs updates much faster.
• Lots of small improvements and bugfixes.
• Based on bitcoinj 0.8.

If you want to take advantage of the new block store format, you need to reset your blockchain once (Options > Settings > Reset Blockchain).

Download/update from Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet
(update will become available during the next hours)

Direct download:
https://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/downloads/list

Source:
https://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/source/checkout


Thanks to everyone who contributed to Bitcoin Wallet and bitcoinj. Mike Hearn again invested lots of work to make mobile wallets work just as snappy as online wallets, but without the disadvantages of online wallets.

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[virtualmaster]

Good work. Thanks.
This version seems to be more stable.
The former one was not usable by me because it was crashing.

[ingrownpocket]

Good work. Thanks.
...

+1

[aceat64]

Awesome work Goonie!

[Mike Hearn]

Great work Andreas!

100x, for new users (and old users if they reset/replay their chain), only the last 5000 headers are stored. This is enough to handle a re-org over 2 months deep, which has never happened in the history of Bitcoin and hopefully never will (it would mean Bitcoin has completely broken, essentially).

Bandwidth usage should be minimal. On the order of a few megabytes a month, if that (it can be much less but it depends how much you use it of course).

[eric7]

Very cool! Thanks!

[Wekkel]

It's this kind of development that gets the coins further. Super!

[Andreas Schildbach]

How much space does it use on the phone?
Also do you know roughly how much bandwith it uses in on month? My cell provider throttles after 2.5 GB I have heard

It boils down to 5-6 MB internal storage usage for the app including all data.

I get along with a 300 MB/month contract, and I also sync+read my email, news and do the occasional browsing. According to "Data usage" the app has used 30.3 MB during the last month, although I'm not sure I'm reading it right.

[yossarian]

+1

I've been using this app for roughly 2 years now and it keeps getting better and better.

Donation is on its way!

[kwukduck]

Still no security features... With lots of people getting into bitcoin this is essential i think.
My phone goes around my friends and family quite a lot, to view pictures, browse the web, play games, so it's out of my sight from time to time.
I don't want anyone to be able to just spend my coins like that if they wish.

I know bitcoin is like cash, but it should be protected by some kind of wallet encryption that requires a password/pin before you can spend whatever is in there.

Time to take this serious i think... I've been nagging about this for what, a year now? xD And i'm sorry if it gets boring and annoying, it's too important to not have this feature i think.

[kwukduck]

Still no security features... With lots of people getting into bitcoin this is essential i think.
My phone goes around my friends and family quite a lot, to view pictures, browse the web, play games, so it's out of my sight from time to time.
I don't want anyone to be able to just spend my coins like that if they wish.

I know bitcoin is like cash, but it should be protected by some kind of wallet encryption that requires a password/pin before you can spend whatever is in there.

Time to take this serious i think... I've been nagging about this for what, a year now? xD And i'm sorry if it gets boring and annoying, it's too important to not have this feature i think.

What kind of security? Typing in a PIN is a pain in the ass, maybe voice patterns? Guess thumb print readers are a way off mainstream yet :/

Typing a pin is a pain in the ass? Are you kidding me? Everybody is messaging and browsing with their smart phones all day long and typing a pin is too much? O_o

Anyway, it should be optional, if you don't wish to use it fine, don't, but i'm pretty sure a lot of mobile users would appreciate some security features that protect our wallet.

[Andreas Schildbach]

Wallet encryption is on track but it still needs quite some work. For example, the internal backup system must be reimplemented (there is no point in encryption if the automatic backups remain unencrypted).

I will probably offer pin or password initially and experiment with NFC tags and other tokens.

Gesture patterns do not offer any security at all. Look at this video, I think you'll understand even without understanding German.

[Mike Hearn]

There used to be apps on the play store that let you lock arbitrary other apps behind PINs or other features, so you couldn't open them. They worked for any app not just ones that supported it. Do those apps still exist? If so it seems like a better feature than reimplementing everything in Bitcoin Wallet.

Bear in mind you can already encrypt your entire phone such that the keys are released only when your screen is unlocked. I think the use case of people who routinely give their phone unlocked to someone they don't trust is rare, and Android tablets since 4.2 support multiple users, which is a better way to solve the issue.

So I am not really convinced this is the best use of time.

Now, having said that, what would be useful is if the wallet could be partially encrypted such that you have a small amount spendable with lax security and a larger amount that maybe requires a password or NFC tag to unlock. In bitcoinj you'd implement this with two wallets created simultaneously, one unlocked, and then some code that sent Bitcoins between them (using real transactions to ensure the outputs were of the right size).

In this way you could have an NFC tag with your password in it, and mostly when you spend money you just do it and don't have to do anything, and you'd keep your NFC tag at home on your table. When you charge your phone at night you rest it on the NFC tag and now both wallets are unlocked and your pocket money can fill up again.

[Andreas Schildbach]

Yes, multiple wallets would be nice for a lot of things. I'd have a third (readonly) wallet which monitors my savings account which is on cold storage.

[sbrzol]

Can i use this wallet to deposit and get back winning from bit365 sportsbook?

"Only use Bitcoin wallets that allow you to receive BTC from the same address you sent from."

[yossarian]

Can i use this wallet to deposit and get back winning from bit365 sportsbook?

"Only use Bitcoin wallets that allow you to receive BTC from the same address you sent from."

Yes.

[FreeTrade]

Thanks for the amazing update Andreas - great to finally have a real Bitcoin wallet that doesn't need the whole blockchain.

Wondering about this . . . .

>Now requires Gingerbread (Android 2.3.3) or later.

What was the dependency or thought behind moving to Gingerbread?

Here's the current version penetration stats -
http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

I'm seeing 1.7% on 2.1 and 4% on 2.2

Quite small numbers, but I think one of the most secure ways to use Bitcoin, especially for a newbie, is to use an old, cheap, android phone as a dedicated hardware wallet. However I think a lot of these phones won't be compatible with BW3.

[Mike Hearn]

Froyo has serious bugs in it that can render the signatures you create on transactions silently incorrect (they will never confirm or propagate).

[FreeTrade]

Froyo has serious bugs in it that can render the signatures you create on transactions silently incorrect (they will never confirm or propagate).

Thanks Mike - is it a library in Froyo that's got the bug? Can you point me towards more information on it?

[Mike Hearn]

It appears that the BigInteger class has some major flaws (in particular, is not thread safe) and was rewritten in Gingerbread. A bad BigInteger class causes the ECDSA calculations to go wrong and fail.

Also, we upgraded to using Java 6 in bitcoinj 0.8 so at that point Froyo got left behind as well.

If you really really cared about Froyo support you could fork the relevant projects, find a way to bundle the Gingerbread BigInteger code and roll back any changes that need Java 6, but for such a small number of users it seems a lot of work. Gingerbread phones are dirt cheap these days and the Froyo devices will eventually break anyway.