MultiBit

[bitcoinspot.nl]

Ok, thanks for your quick reply!

looking forward to rc of version 5

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[jim618]

Thanks Roland.

So am I !

:-)

[jim618]

I normally only post technical stuff on this thread but I feel like a change this morning.

Years ago I read an article in the Economist about frugal innovation. It is the idea that development and new ideas will now appear from right across the globe because of the increase in telecoms, spread of computers and improved literacy. It always stuck in my mind that all you really needed to build something new was a laptop and plenty of time.

When I first learnt about Bitcoin I was like everybody and thought "Great! Finally humanity has something where we can dump the 'fiat currency oligarchs' and have our own currency". You know what I mean otherwise you would not be reading this.

My background is in software development teams so I knew it was going to be man-years of work to roll out Bitcoin to the whole planet. Something as extensive and novel as Bitcoin does not happen overnight. But who is going to do the actual work ? Fortunately due to a combination of skills learnt, motivation and circumstances I knew I could spend pretty much as long as it took to do my part. (MultiBit and contributions into bitcoinj obviously).

It has been great fun spending months coding stuff up, fixing bugs and all the other bits and pieces.
In life however you cannot have it all so there are naturally some sacrifices to be made. Right from the start I wanted all the code I wrote to be open source and freely available. There is no money to be made in open source wallets.

I have cash saved from my years of dev work but take frugal innovation seriously. MultiBit HQ is a narrowboat moored on a canal in the UK. Costs are minimized ruthlessly. It is really peaceful living on a narrowboat - plenty of time to get work done.

But this time of year it is a bit ridiculous. There is a cold snap in the UK at the moment. Overnight temp last night was -6 Celcius. The boat does have central heating but you don't run it all the time and not overnight (because of electricity and diesel use). So last night I am in my full body sleeping outfit, in a down sleeping bag, under a duvet, with a throw. Warm and toasty but it is a bit chilly cleaning your teeth in the morning when the temp in the bathroom is exactly 0 Celcius.

Like your pet cat, I always find the warmest spot on the boat so am currently typing on my laptop by the big radiator in the lounge. I am just a ball of insulation.

I will be glad when it is spring. I think that is the best time on a boat.

Ok - indulgent blogging over - back to work !

:-)

[Mike Hearn]

Hah, great post Jim. Living on a houseboat, how very charming!

In case you decide ruthless cost minimization has its limits, perhaps you could consider providing a list of interesting projects and feature enhancements along with assurance contracts for their completion. Whilst Bitcoin doesn't really make it easy to do assurance contracts today, you could still do it "old school" with a spreadsheet, manually managing pledges and some big dollops of trust. And of course one of the contracts on offer could be to implement proper assurance contract support for Bitcoin.

[jim618]

Hi Mike,

Yes - it is pretty good fun living on a boat.

For the "basic product" of MultiBit i.e. what people use to send and receive bitcoin I am quite happy to help code it all up and get it out there as we are doing now. Hopefully by the middle of 2013 we will have:
+ encrypted wallets
+ Bloom filters
+ HD wallets
+ Trezor support
+ fee calc support

At that point I think MultiBit/ bitcoinj will be 'done' (don't laugh please!). Then all the interesting stuff that is possible with Bitcoin but is not being worked on deserves re-looking at.

That could be assurance contract driven definitely. It depends a bit I think on what licencing the people putting up the money ask for.
At this point in Bitcoin's life there is still a big chunk of infrastructure work that needs doing. Keeping that all open source I think is preferable.

I don't think we are going to run out of things to do.

[Andreas Schildbach]

I think we won't run out of work on "basic stuff" either.

Bloom filtering is just an optimization. We will need more optimizations in future.

Even if Bitcoin does not grow, the blockchain grows constantly. Thus, I think we need proper support for checkpoints, so new users (or old users re-installing from scratch) won't need to wait forever.

And if Bitcoin grows (which we all hope), we will run into more limits, some of which we already anticipate.

This is all just to keep the basic features running.

[jim618]

Hi Andreas,

Yes I am sure you are right.
Automotive engineers are still improving the 'horseless carriage' after a hundred years of development.

[Jouke]

I normally only post technical stuff on this thread but I feel like a change this morning.

Years ago I read an article in the Economist about frugal innovation. It is the idea that development and new ideas will now appear from right across the globe because of the increase in telecoms, spread of computers and improved literacy. It always stuck in my mind that all you really needed to build something new was a laptop and plenty of time.

When I first learnt about Bitcoin I was like everybody and thought "Great! Finally humanity has something where we can dump the 'fiat currency oligarchs' and have our own currency". You know what I mean otherwise you would not be reading this.

My background is in software development teams so I knew it was going to be man-years of work to roll out Bitcoin to the whole planet. Something as extensive and novel as Bitcoin does not happen overnight. But who is going to do the actual work ? Fortunately due to a combination of skills learnt, motivation and circumstances I knew I could spend pretty much as long as it took to do my part. (MultiBit and contributions into bitcoinj obviously).

It has been great fun spending months coding stuff up, fixing bugs and all the other bits and pieces.
In life however you cannot have it all so there are naturally some sacrifices to be made. Right from the start I wanted all the code I wrote to be open source and freely available. There is no money to be made in open source wallets.

I have cash saved from my years of dev work but take frugal innovation seriously. MultiBit HQ is a narrowboat moored on a canal in the UK. Costs are minimized ruthlessly. It is really peaceful living on a narrowboat - plenty of time to get work done.

But this time of year it is a bit ridiculous. There is a cold snap in the UK at the moment. Overnight temp last night was -6 Celcius. The boat does have central heating but you don't run it all the time and not overnight (because of electricity and diesel use). So last night I am in my full body sleeping outfit, in a down sleeping bag, under a duvet, with a throw. Warm and toasty but it is a bit chilly cleaning your teeth in the morning when the temp in the bathroom is exactly 0 Celcius.

Like your pet cat, I always find the warmest spot on the boat so am currently typing on my laptop by the big radiator in the lounge. I am just a ball of insulation.

I will be glad when it is spring. I think that is the best time on a boat.

Ok - indulgent blogging over - back to work !

:-)

I always like to know a little more about people, so I don't mind a little personal blogging at all!

[jim618]

Cheers Jouke !
:-)

[World]

MultiBit HQ is a narrowboat moored on a canal in the UK.

The reason why I like MultiBit 

[bitcoinspot.nl]

just a little offtopic question:

Multibit is a "light" client is it not ? and the bitcoin-qt client is a, how do you call it "full client". Difference is that the full client participates in checking transactions on the network and the light client does not. am i correct in that ?

and if so:
1. could people just run a bitcoin-qt client with an empty wallet just for the sake of supporting the network ?
2. wouldn't it be great if multibit also has an option so that you can choose between light and full ?

Greets roland.

[bitcoinspot.nl]

btw i would like to see how bitcoin-hq looks like got some pictures of your boat ?

[jim618]

I'll take one tomorrow - all iced in - and post it.
:-)

[jim618]

MultiBit HQ is a narrowboat moored on a canal in the UK.

The reason why I like MultiBit 

That's funny ! :-)

[jim618]

just a little offtopic question:

Multibit is a "light" client is it not ? and the bitcoin-qt client is a, how do you call it "full client". Difference is that the full client participates in checking transactions on the network and the light client does not. am i correct in that ?

and if so:
1. could people just run a bitcoin-qt client with an empty wallet just for the sake of supporting the network ?
2. wouldn't it be great if multibit also has an option so that you can choose between light and full ?

Greets roland.

A full client is as you say - bitcoin QT has a full copy of the blockchain and relays all the transactions through the network. You can run one with an empty wallet and it helps the network yes.

The term 'light/ lite' client basically refers to a client that cuts down on either the data it stores or the work it does (or both). It varies a bit from client to client exactly what they do.
MultiBit: connects to bitcoin QT servers, downloads block headers from the past and (currently) full blocks from the present. Does not relay transactions.
Electrum: connects to special servers that transmit transactions/ send back unspent outputs.
BitcoinSpinner: similar to Electrum but there is only a single server cluster on the backend.
Android Bitcoin Wallet: very similar to MultiBit ( as both are based on bitcoinj).

Re: MultiBit optionally becoming 'full'. Matt Corallo has done work on making bitcoinj operate as a full bitcoin node but I doubt I will ever put it into MultiBit. I just want MultiBit to be wallet software for people to put their BTC in and be able to spend it. No more. No less.

[bitcoinspot.nl]

hi jim,

thanks for your reply,

what exactly is done when a client "relays a transaction" does it check the transaction just like a miner ? and how does relaying a transaction help the network ?

Greets, roland.

[jim618]

hi jim,

thanks for your reply,

what exactly is done when a client "relays a transaction" does it check the transaction just like a miner ? and how does relaying a transaction help the network ?

Greets, roland.

A good example of relaying is to think what actually happens when you do a send.
Say I want to send a transaction from the UK to you in the Netherlands.

My copy of MultiBit is connected to 4 bitcoind nodes, A, B, C, D. Say it sends the transaction to node A. Node A checks that the transaction is 'good' ie no double spends, fee if necessary etc. If it is good then it will send it on to the other bitcoind nodes it is connected to. They in turn perform the same checks and pass it on if they are happy with it.  This is the peer-to-peer network in action.

Eventually a node will pass the transaction to your client and you will see it as a zero confirmation transaction.

Also, the nodes B, C and D will pass it back to me. Once at least one of them has given the transaction back to me then I know it has made it out into the network successfully (the boomerang rule). MultiBit then allows you to spend that transaction's change.

[jim618]

I was out this morning and took a couple of photos of the boat:

View of the stern:
https://multibit.org/postImages/boatStern.jpg

and of the bow:
https://multibit.org/postImages/boatBow.jpg

If you happen to recognise the stretch of canal please keep it to yourself as I prefer to keep things low key.

[Atruk]

Hopefully by the middle of 2013 we will have:
+ encrypted wallets
+ HD wallets

This would be so great. I recently switched to Multibit for handling my wallet because last month Bitcoin-qt/Armory became too much for my laptop as the blockchain expanded. I still run full bitcoind on the home server to help the network, but the laptop travels a lot and the sync time was getting to be too much.

I love the Multibit interface with the MtGox values, keeping the last sent transaction details in the send tab, and the nice GTK+ theme. I miss my encrypted deterministic wallet though.

[bitcoinspot.nl]

ever tried to get it accross the channel to amsterdam ?