MultiBit

[mila]

you could as well just serve an HTML UI and have web browsers on a faster computer control it.

this ^^ html + browser on a faster computer
edit: when it comes to raspberry pi, mine has no screen attached and is not running any window manager
in fact it's behind the wardrobe with only lan & power. local client with remote access and fast and secure and ... just teasing.

[jim618]

There is a new test release of MultiBit at:

github.com

Version 0.5.5beta (Encrypted wallets)

Enhancements:
+ New encrypted wallet format - NOT backwards compatible.
   (Unencrypted wallets are unchanged)
+ Fix for bug where encrypted wallets could be opened as unencrypted
+ Arabic translation 100%
+ Automatic backup of private keys on wallet encryption/ change password/ create new private keys
+ Forward port of everything from version 0.4.13
+ Update to bitcoinj version 0.6


Scan of release checklist

[Aahz]

Hi, Jim,

I tried searching this thread to see if anyone has run into the same problem as me and you answered already, but I wasn't able to find anything.  If you've answered a similar question before, I apologize. 

I just recently installed MultiBit, and I tried to send coins for the first time two days ago.  The wallet has the available coins, and according to the transactions log, they were sent (and deducted from my balance), but the transaction has been stuck at "This transaction is not yet confirmed, seen by 1 peer" ever since.  It hasn't yet gone into a chain.

I've tried looking for it in the logs to see if I could debug the issue myself, but I don't see it in them.

I'm on version 0.4.12 and using Ubuntu 12.04 if you need to know that.  I'd appreciate any help you can give.  Thanks!

I've had this same problem pretty consistently since 0.4.8.  Just upgraded to 0.4.13 yesterday and it's still happening.  Never used strongcoin and the addresses I'm using have never been in another client.

It (one peer, not in blockchain) was lasting about 60-90 minutes, but my first send with 0.4.13 has been stuck this way for just over two hours now. Several transactions never propagated at all and I needed to reebuild the blockchain to "free up" those coins.

What more information is needed (steps to be taken) to get out of the land of "If the transaction is not found then it indicates that the transaction was never sent properly, the transaction never propagated (perhaps a double spend) or some other reason. This needs more information to track down."?

-Aahz

[Mushroomized]

Farting out an idea I might play around with later that might be of interest to you---

The ability to generate a one time use wallet and send an amount to it saved as a file.

The file can be emailed, copied or pasted etc.

One the file is dragged on to the client, the client accepts to privikey, dumps the coins onto your wallet, and the file is now worthless.

Why?

1) It'd be cool
2) You could use it to store coins offline... kind of?
3) Great explaining tool
4) It'd be cool
5) If someone wants to accept bitcoin, but didn't give you an address to send it to, plop the file in an email.

[ErebusBat]

Farting out an idea I might play around with later that might be of interest to you---

The ability to generate a one time use wallet and send an amount to it saved as a file.

The file can be emailed, copied or pasted etc.

One the file is dragged on to the client, the client accepts to privikey, dumps the coins onto your wallet, and the file is now worthless.

Why?

1) It'd be cool
2) You could use it to store coins offline... kind of?
3) Great explaining tool
4) It'd be cool
5) If someone wants to accept bitcoin, but didn't give you an address to send it to, plop the file in an email.

Email is not a secure transfer.... what happens when the files are snarfed off the top?

[phelix]

Yes there are a few possibilities (used separately or together):

1) strip down the UI to something very simple, perhaps just have a single wallet.
2) have a dedicated display (a little 2x16 LCD for instance I have seen breadboards for)
3) use a remote viewer (VNC, a web server serving HTML, hell: ssh)
4) physical buttons, using the GPIO pins.
5) there is also audio out. I think it probably has enough oomph for basic speech synthesis.

The good thing with the Raspberry Pi hardware platform is that the code for 'we need a wallet, to be able to download the block info, oh we need to send too' is written and working.

just coming from a local bitcoin meet up. i told about what you were doing and someone came up with the idea of using a custom rom on an old/low end android smartphone - might be even cheaper than the rp.

[jim618]

I've had this same problem pretty consistently since 0.4.8.  Just upgraded to 0.4.13 yesterday and it's still happening.  Never used strongcoin and the addresses I'm using have never been in another client.

It (one peer, not in blockchain) was lasting about 60-90 minutes, but my first send with 0.4.13 has been stuck this way for just over two hours now. Several transactions never propagated at all and I needed to reebuild the blockchain to "free up" those coins.

What more information is needed (steps to be taken) to get out of the land of "If the transaction is not found then it indicates that the transaction was never sent properly, the transaction never propagated (perhaps a double spend) or some other reason. This needs more information to track down."?

-Aahz

What fee have you got set ?
If you have it less than 0.001 BTC you could well see delays in getting into a block because the miners choose other 'juicier' transactions.

When you say 'it was lasting 60-90 minutes' are you saying that eventually it got into a block and showed up as confirmed in MultiBit ? Or does it never get confirmed ?

Also, where are your BTC coming from ? Are they mining dues ie coming from a coinbase ?

[jim618]

Farting out an idea I might play around with later that might be of interest to you---

The ability to generate a one time use wallet and send an amount to it saved as a file.

The file can be emailed, copied or pasted etc.

One the file is dragged on to the client, the client accepts to privikey, dumps the coins onto your wallet, and the file is now worthless.

Why?

1) It'd be cool
2) You could use it to store coins offline... kind of?
3) Great explaining tool
4) It'd be cool
5) If someone wants to accept bitcoin, but didn't give you an address to send it to, plop the file in an email.

What you are effectively doing here is mailing a wallet file directly. Because regular mail is not secure you would have to encrypt the private keys ie mail someone an encrypted wallet and tell them via a different channel what the password was.

This leads to trust problems. I can email myself an encrypted wallet backup no problem, as I trust myself, but as soon as you mail a private key to another party there is the 'who spent it ?' problem.

Mailing a private key is like having a joint account with someone.

[Aahz]

I've had this same problem pretty consistently since 0.4.8.  Just upgraded to 0.4.13 yesterday and it's still happening.  Never used strongcoin and the addresses I'm using have never been in another client.

It (one peer, not in blockchain) was lasting about 60-90 minutes, but my first send with 0.4.13 has been stuck this way for just over two hours now. Several transactions never propagated at all and I needed to reebuild the blockchain to "free up" those coins.

What more information is needed (steps to be taken) to get out of the land of "If the transaction is not found then it indicates that the transaction was never sent properly, the transaction never propagated (perhaps a double spend) or some other reason. This needs more information to track down."?

-Aahz

What fee have you got set ?
If you have it less than 0.001 BTC you could well see delays in getting into a block because the miners choose other 'juicier' transactions.

When you say 'it was lasting 60-90 minutes' are you saying that eventually it got into a block and showed up as confirmed in MultiBit ? Or does it never get confirmed ?

Also, where are your BTC coming from ? Are they mining dues ie coming from a coinbase ?

The fee is at MultiBit's default 0.0001, but the problem isn't getting confirmations, it's getting it recognized by the blockchain at all.

About half the time, after the 60-90 minutes it would finally show up at blockchain.info as unconfirmed.  Confirmation time is a whole different issue and clearly not a MultiBit issue.  The other half of the time it would go a day or more and I'd have to rebuild the blockchain in MultiBit to free up the coins.

The bitcoin came from various buyers of my products, donors to my websites, and bitcoin gambling sites or exchanges.  None came from mining.

[jim618]

I presume you mean 0.001 and not 0.0001 in your reply.
The MultiBit default is now 0.001 but there is a minimum of 0.0001.

Could you PM me some example transaction ids of transactions that took 60-90 minutes and some that still had not propagated through the network in a day (and tell me which are which!)

Maybe there is a clue in the transaction structure.

[Mushroomized]

Farting out an idea I might play around with later that might be of interest to you---

The ability to generate a one time use wallet and send an amount to it saved as a file.

The file can be emailed, copied or pasted etc.

One the file is dragged on to the client, the client accepts to privikey, dumps the coins onto your wallet, and the file is now worthless.

Why?

1) It'd be cool
2) You could use it to store coins offline... kind of?
3) Great explaining tool
4) It'd be cool
5) If someone wants to accept bitcoin, but didn't give you an address to send it to, plop the file in an email.

What you are effectively doing here is mailing a wallet file directly. Because regular mail is not secure you would have to encrypt the private keys ie mail someone an encrypted wallet and tell them via a different channel what the password was.

This leads to trust problems. I can email myself an encrypted wallet backup no problem, as I trust myself, but as soon as you mail a private key to another party there is the 'who spent it ?' problem.

Mailing a private key is like having a joint account with someone.

Yes I understand. Thats why you would generate a new keypair in that file that would be sent. I never meant it would be exactly secure but it could have some other purpose I can't think of right now. But maybe.

[jim618]

Yes there are a few possibilities (used separately or together):

1) strip down the UI to something very simple, perhaps just have a single wallet.
2) have a dedicated display (a little 2x16 LCD for instance I have seen breadboards for)
3) use a remote viewer (VNC, a web server serving HTML, hell: ssh)
4) physical buttons, using the GPIO pins.
5) there is also audio out. I think it probably has enough oomph for basic speech synthesis.

The good thing with the Raspberry Pi hardware platform is that the code for 'we need a wallet, to be able to download the block info, oh we need to send too' is written and working.

just coming from a local bitcoin meet up. i told about what you were doing and someone came up with the idea of using a custom rom on an old/low end android smartphone - might be even cheaper than the rp.

Sounds an interesting idea and an interesting evening ! Breadboarding discretes I am happy doing, but custom roms is a bit beyond my skill level I am afraid. Also, I imagine there are ten times as many 'breadboarders' as 'rom programmers' to get ideas from. Not disagreeing with you mind - it is just the time and effort to learn something and skill up.

[Aahz]

Hmmm... My fee is currently at 0.0001, not 0.001.  I removed my last install and installed 0.4.13 fresh, so assumed it went back to default, guess it did not.

Transaction from a few days ago that took more than an hour to appear in blockchain: fec3c1ec7bdf61253a40151c3b5eaba553a127946ae77a500dfef0de6e906a35
Transaction sent 30 minutes ago: fcb7ef93767d684828b6d10b55af98d36db5fe70a9da113906e7bfa38da8f6de: Seen by 1 peer. Not seen in chain.

I don't have any of the multi-day stalled transaction IDs as they vanish when I reset the blockchain.

-Aahz

[jim618]

Farting out an idea I might play around with later that might be of interest to you---

The ability to generate a one time use wallet and send an amount to it saved as a file.

The file can be emailed, copied or pasted etc.

One the file is dragged on to the client, the client accepts to privikey, dumps the coins onto your wallet, and the file is now worthless.

Why?

1) It'd be cool
2) You could use it to store coins offline... kind of?
3) Great explaining tool
4) It'd be cool
5) If someone wants to accept bitcoin, but didn't give you an address to send it to, plop the file in an email.

What you are effectively doing here is mailing a wallet file directly. Because regular mail is not secure you would have to encrypt the private keys ie mail someone an encrypted wallet and tell them via a different channel what the password was.

This leads to trust problems. I can email myself an encrypted wallet backup no problem, as I trust myself, but as soon as you mail a private key to another party there is the 'who spent it ?' problem.

Mailing a private key is like having a joint account with someone.

Yes I understand. Thats why you would generate a new keypair in that file that would be sent. I never meant it would be exactly secure but it could have some other purpose I can't think of right now. But maybe.

There was a guy at the Bitcoin Conference in London discussing using encrypted private keys in the way you describe to store donations actually IN an RFID tag. Cheap Mifare tags hold around 4KB. That is only a few transactions but keys are the order of 32 bytes (unencrypted) so the space saving is a big advantage.

[jim618]

Hmmm... My fee is currently at 0.0001, not 0.001.  I removed my last install and installed 0.4.13 fresh, so assumed it went back to default, guess it did not.

Transaction from a few days ago that took more than an hour to appear in blockchain: fec3c1ec7bdf61253a40151c3b5eaba553a127946ae77a500dfef0de6e906a35
Transaction sent 30 minutes ago: fcb7ef93767d684828b6d10b55af98d36db5fe70a9da113906e7bfa38da8f6de: Seen by 1 peer. Not seen in chain.

I don't have any of the multi-day stalled transaction IDs as they vanish when I reset the blockchain.

-Aahz

The fee choice is stored in the multibit.properties in your user data so you have kept it.
That could well be it.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that dropping to a fee of 0.0005 rather than 0.001 started bumping me from getting in the next block (for testing I like to save time so am happy to pay more).

Experiment with a fee of 0.001 for a few days and see if that solves it. Let me know if it does (or not). Trying to pin down exactly what happens to transactions is more art than science sometimes.

[m4rtin]

I'd like to add extra ticker to MultiBit - can you give me a push in the right direction where to start?
Thanks

[jim618]

Hi m4rtin,

The data for the ticker comes from the XChange library and the class that actually grabs the data is called:
org.multibit.exchange.TickerTimerTask

That is the place to start.

The ticker user interface is a:
org.multibit.viewsystem.swing.view.ticker.TickerTablePanel

and the model for the table is the TickerTableModel in the same package.

The UI for the settings to choose the columns etc are in:
org.multibit.viewsystem.swing.view.ShowPreferencesPanel
 
and are persisted by:
org.multibit.viewsystem.swing.action.ShowPreferencesSubmitAction

Let me know if anything is unclear.

[jim618]

There is a new live release of MultiBit at:

multibit.org


Version 0.4.14

Improvements
+ Arabic 100%
+ Fix for chart balance not matching wallet balance



Scan of release checklist

This release is primarily to get the Arabic translation onto multibit.org.

[phelix]

Farting out an idea I might play around with later that might be of interest to you---

The ability to generate a one time use wallet and send an amount to it saved as a file.

The file can be emailed, copied or pasted etc.

One the file is dragged on to the client, the client accepts to privikey, dumps the coins onto your wallet, and the file is now worthless.

Why?

1) It'd be cool
2) You could use it to store coins offline... kind of?
3) Great explaining tool
4) It'd be cool
5) If someone wants to accept bitcoin, but didn't give you an address to send it to, plop the file in an email.

What you are effectively doing here is mailing a wallet file directly. Because regular mail is not secure you would have to encrypt the private keys ie mail someone an encrypted wallet and tell them via a different channel what the password was.

This leads to trust problems. I can email myself an encrypted wallet backup no problem, as I trust myself, but as soon as you mail a private key to another party there is the 'who spent it ?' problem.

Mailing a private key is like having a joint account with someone.

Yes I understand. Thats why you would generate a new keypair in that file that would be sent. I never meant it would be exactly secure but it could have some other purpose I can't think of right now. But maybe.

kinda like http://bitaddress.org (somewhere on this forum there is also a thread about banknote design)

[jim618]

At the moment key handling is a bit limited in MultiBit, primarily because it does not store all the transactions (or even all the unspent transaction outputs). Of course this has its pros and cons.

I have a little acronym for the main things I want to get into MultiBit before it is 'finished' (whatever that means!). It is:

C - get change spendable. The work on tracking the peers that have seen transactions is the preliminary to this.
C - currency support - type in USD, convert to BTC
E - encrypted wallets in the live code
S - speed - faster sync using bloom filters.
H - hierarchical deterministic wallets, which will also give brain wallet support.

Other than the currency support, most of the rest is code that needs to go into bitcoinj so will be written by various people.

Gary Rowe has been working solidly on MultiBit merchant which is an open source solution that anyone can use to make websites that natively use bitcoin. At some point I want to switch effort onto help build that out (as I have more time than him).