A random user observation

[Andreas Schildbach]

I just witnessed a beginner being overburdened by the multiple wallet interface of MultiBit. I assume she downloaded MultiBit because its the recommended client for her Windows notebook. She bought a large sum of Bitcoins face to face from a trader. I entered the scene when she wondered why the amount has been confirmed on the blockchain.info page she had opened but it wasn't even appearing in MultiBit. I quickly checked the addresses and they were different. This is when I got very concerned about her coins. In the end, we found out she had in inadvertently created multiple wallets and switched to the wrong one. I don't know why all the balances in the overview showed BTC 0.

Anyway, today it struck me that we need even simpler wallets. No multi wallets, no several currencies, no key import/export (except for backups) and also no watch-only keys or fancy stuff like that. Larger fonts (!), less buttons. Less options. No multiple views on the same data. It really needs to stay as simple as possible. Otherwise, we will see many people ending up frustrated, especially if at some point in time they are being forced into Bitcoin (because the Euro gets worthless).

Edit: Ah, and I should add that I was also overburdened with the whole situation, at least for some painful minutes. I wasn't familiar with the MultiBit UI.

[jim618]

Hi Andreas,

Yes - I quite agree, MultiBit is too complicated for the next stage of Bitcoin rollout.

For the next version - MBHD - we were planning to have a main wallet (which will always be in the user data directory i.e. no opening and closing wallets as people tend to lose them). Plus when you plug in a Trezor you'll see it.

For backups were were thinking of:

+ seed phrase
+ local automatic backups (pretty similar to what exists in MB now)
+ extra saves to a 'cloud sync directory' so that you can use SpiderOak or whatever


To get round 'I've lost my password' we were going to:

+ from the seed phrase create a PGP private key and public key.
+ encrypt the wallet password with the PGP public key, which is stored locally. (Throw away PGP private key)

Then if the user forgets their password, they can reenter their seed phrase, recreate their PGP private key and decrypt their encrypted password to get it back.

Also some simplications like only having one exchange rate shown and used.

[Mike Hearn]

All that sounds great. Do you have any status update on the progress of MBHD?

[jim618]

All that sounds great. Do you have any status update on the progress of MBHD?

Hi Mike,

We've started on the UI rework. Gary started off with a JavaFX rewrite but we ran into what can only be described as 'early adopter' pains.

For instance, the RTL does not work ('wait for Java 8') and we think Java 8 will be too big a JRE to bundle (around 150 MB compressed rather than 40 MBish for Java 7).

So we are going to redo the UI but keep it in Swing. Oh well.


I haven't started on the core module to do the backend stuff yet - still trying to clear the decks from other work.

We've put it in a closed repo at the moment (mainly as we don't want anyone making HD wallets until everything works - we haven't even started that work) but if you want access just say. It'll all be open source eventually.

[elasticband]

+1 from me(love your app)

 accessibility is key to adoption. If my grandmother can't read/use it easily then she won't....

[Mike Hearn]

Why do you think Java 8 will be 3x the size of Java 7? Are you mixing up the JDK and the JRE?

The windows JRE for the pre-releases is 29mb. That's smaller than Java 7 and that's before you use the bundler tool to reduce the size, or do other manual hacks (it includes a full copy of WebKit, which you can probably do without).

https://jdk8.java.net/download.html

I've been using the Java 8 pre-releases now for a while and not had any problems. So I'd suggest re-examining that.

BTW, I made a start on HDW support in bitcoinj. So if you're planning to do work on that please do let me know so we can co-ordinate.

[jim618]

Why do you think Java 8 will be 3x the size of Java 7? Are you mixing up the JDK and the JRE?

The windows JRE for the pre-releases is 29mb. That's smaller than Java 7 and that's before you use the bundler tool to reduce the size, or do other manual hacks (it includes a full copy of WebKit, which you can probably do without).

https://jdk8.java.net/download.html

I've been using the Java 8 pre-releases now for a while and not had any problems. So I'd suggest re-examining that.

BTW, I made a start on HDW support in bitcoinj. So if you're planning to do work on that please do let me know so we can co-ordinate.

We were looking at the unoptimised size of the APP being created by our build - I would have thought it bundled the JRE but will look again. 29MB for a JRE would be very nice.

Edit: good to hear that you've started on the HDW support in bitcoinj - yes we will definitely want to use all of that (this will all be bleeding edge for a while but that does not matter).

[Mike Hearn]

Hmm, OK. It would be weird if the bundled app managed to be larger than the entire downloadable JRE, but perhaps something strange is going on there.

I haven't tried the bundler myself though.