Hi Craig,
It`s nice to see someone from the team taking the initiative to answer here. I really appreciate that. I understand that message is just to say do things at your own risk but one thing I don`t understand is that, if Omni is safe, secure and old enough to mature and become a "rock-solid" software, why do you still have a very serious, scary looking message there?
I want to remind everyone that the message says
- This software should be considered as "Alpha Level". not even beta.
- Your everything can be lost due to glitches and bugs
- Don`t use it for significant amounts of BTC
These are pretty bold and scary statements. What I undestand from your message is that software is safe, solid and mature enough to be used for big amounts but the message says the opposite.
So I`d appreciate if you can elaborate the conflict a bit more.
PS: Still haven`t used Omni yet because of that msg.
Like I said, we’ve been around a while, although I don’t check bitcointalk as often as I probably should.
So, the software version is 0.0.12. Omni Core has been around for just under two years now with zero reports of lost, corrupted, etc wallets or coins (0.0.12 came about maybe three weeks ago). The next version will be 0.2 (yes, I know these are entirely arbitrary), but the developers decided that after this long, we need to bump it a bit to look a bit less alpha-y. That being said, the developers take their responsibility extremely seriously, and lots of people complain that Omni progress is slow, but it’s slow due to the absurd amount of testing we do on each feature before we activate them (we even release features in the software that aren’t yet activated so that we can continue testing them in a non-consensus-breaking manner before activating the feature dynamically for the installed user base).
I use it daily (on a Mac) - the same builds we provide to everyone else. I honestly doubt anything I say can sway someone being cautious, because the warning is there and the developers think it should be. Maybe in the next release it will get removed, but I’d still recommend that people dealing with large amounts of funds be wary and cautious of *any* crypto software out there. You’re installing software that (in some cases) can hold the vast majority of someone’s wealth. That should scare the hell out of all of us.
All I can say is this: I am a regular user of the desktop client, and there are (evidently) thousands of others running as well (based on our download counts). If you prefer, there is always Omniwallet.org (web wallet) that you could use instead (user controlled keys, client-side decryption and signing), or hosted wallets like HolyTransaction. Obviously I wouldn’t recommend holding your coins at an exchange that supports Omni, but those are the existing options. The good news is, all wallet control and the vast majority of RPC in the client literally *is* Bitcoin Core, so I trust it as much as I trust Bitcoin Core.
I hope you have a good experience with it. Let me know what you think if you eventually fire it up.
Cheers,
Craig
