How do Paper Wallets work? I'm completely mystified

[WilderedB]

Uninstalled the QT client, tried downloading again..

http://bitcoin.org/en/download

This only gives us Windows users the option of a file called bitcoin-08.1.win32setup

"win32"?

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit - is that the problem?


 

[1714009227]

1714009227

[etotheipi]

Uninstalled the QT client, tried downloading again..

http://bitcoin.org/en/download

This only gives us Windows users the option of a file called bitcoin-08.1.win32setup

"win32"?

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit - is that the problem?


 

Yeah.   There is only one version of the clients for each Bitcoin and Armory.  32-bit runs fine on 64 bit arch as long as it doesn't use more than 4GB RAM

[WilderedB]

Well that sucks.


Thanks anyway.




A.

[etotheipi]

Well that sucks.
Thanks anyway.
A.

Wait what?  It does work.  Just use 32-bit.  It works on all architectures.

[WilderedB]

I asked if the 64 bit thing was the problem and you said 'Yeah.'

 

Alternatively it could just be this POS computer. It's the worse computer I've ever owned in my life, crashes 4 or 5 times a day and it's only 2 months old. It's actually LESS reliable than the 3 year old computer I was replacing.

My next PC will be a Mac.

Does Armory work on Mac? Yay! It doe.... ah. Sort of.

I got so sick of this new machine freezing up (and absolutely HATE Windows 8 ) that I bought a 2nd hand MacBook Pro, to ease my transition to Macs. Lemme try installing on that..

[etotheipi]

I asked if the 64 bit thing was the problem and you said 'Yeah.'

 

Alternatively it could just be this POS computer. It's the worse computer I've ever owned in my life, crashes 4 or 5 times a day and it's only 2 months old. It's actually LESS reliable than the 3 year old computer I was replacing.

My next PC will be a Mac.

Does Armory work on Mac? Yay! It doe.... ah. Sort of.

I got so sick of this new machine freezing up (and absolutely HATE Windows 8 ) that I bought a 2nd hand MacBook Pro, to ease my transition to Macs. Lemme try installing on that..

Only recently was I able to add support for OSX, and it's not universal.  No guarantees that it works, there.  But there is a downloader on the site.

[WilderedB]

Nope, aint gonna work. Your site says it's for 10.8, my little laptop is runnng OSX 10.7

 

[etotheipi]

Nope, aint gonna work. Your site says it's for 10.8, my little laptop is runnng OSX 10.7

 

Oh please try it anyway.  It turns out that it does work on some 10.7.  I thought it was 10.8, but some 10.7'ers reported success.  I still haven't figured out the conditions that cause it to not work.

[WilderedB]

OK, I'll give it a bash 

It'll be sometime tomorrow, hopefully, when it's finished downloading the block chain.

Heck, the gutless little thing took 10 mins just opening the app. Powerful it isn't.

I'm in Malaysia, nearly 4 AM here. I'll leave the Macbook running but for now I'm off to bed.. In the meantime do you have a link or could you explain how one uses the signature thing to send money without a private key? I found a "message signing" thing, with a screen full of fields? Is that it? How does one use it?


And thank you for your patience...

[etotheipi]

No no no.  Thank you for your patience!  I'm surprised your still beating your head against it after the troubles you reported.  For reference, I think most users have less difficulty than that.  The program wouldn't be very popular if everyone had to go through it.  So you probably got unlucky.  Or had too little RAM (yeah... the major upgrade I'm working on is making it much more lightweight)

There is the Offline Wallet Tutorial.  It's kind of wordy.  We're working on an illustrated tutorial with screenshots right now.

Just bear in mind, up until this point, I've been the only person developing Armory.  So, keeping up with the website has been a little ... low priority.  Thanks again for your patience.  Please continue this conversation over in the Armory subforum.

[charleshoskinson]

I have integrated an entire lecture on how to create a paperwallet in my free course:

https://www.udemy.com/bitcoin-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-crypto/

I will also release a lecture on Armory that will explain the same thing.

[twobits]

OK... thanks for that...

Just downloaded Armory.. It says I don't have the software? Oh, you mean the main client thing?

The thing that takes forever to try to catch up with the entire history of bitcoin, and then says there was an error and starts all over again? THAT software?



Oh boy..

I was starting to think I was the only one seeing this!   I am getting real tempted to go back to an older version that did not have this problem of  always needing to reindex the blockchain.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=184125.0

[etotheipi]

Unfortunately, that's the "cost" of security.  Some would argue that the alternatives are really not that insecure.  And they're kind of right.  But Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind is the gold standard of network security (kind of, by definition, but doesn't matter).  So that's what I gotta go with to make sure that Armory users don't end up on arbitrary hard forks due to subtle bugs in some reimplementation detail. 

I'm working on making it smoother... but I got a ways to go, yet...

[TierNolan]

Unfortunately, that's the "cost" of security.

Have you considered fork detection?  Tracking all active forks just requires that you code the hash function correctly.

You could have a warning on your GUI if any fork is receiving more than 5% of the total mining power. 

Pop-up a big warning (and disable transactions) that the network isn't able to agree on the main fork.

If you have verified the current chain and the current chain is receiving 99% of the hashing power, then everything is good.

The disadvantage with the scheme is that if someone creates an alt-chain by hard forking, your code would detect it.  This would require manually marking certain forks as not real.