MultiBit

[jim618]

We now have a German translation for MultiBit !

Thanks to freemoney458, on this site, for doing this translation for us.
Here is a screenshot - there are a couple of terms I have added in the last day or two in English, but other than that it is a complete translation.

http://multibit.org/postImages/german.png

p.s. it will appear in the next beta's installers.

[steelhouse]

This is great, how does it compress the block chain.  Does it use someone else's block chain?  This is great it is so small and fast, but I wonder in laymans terms how it works?   I wonder if it protects the network?  Is it just a online wallet disguised as a client?

[jim618]

Thanks for your feedback steelhouse.
I thought I would try to answer your questions, together with other ones I have been asked such as:
"Where are the private keys stored ?",
by describing what MultiBit is actually doing.


A day in the life of MultiBit:

1. When you install MultiBit, is comes with a recent blockchain. This is about half the install download.

2. You start up MultiBit and it connects to bitcoin full nodes - i.e. nodes running bitcoind - in the normal peer-to-peer fashion. (You can also configure it to connect to a specific node if you want.)

3. MultiBit loads from disk the user's wallet file. The user's private keys are stored in the wallet.

4. MultiBit starts downloading new blocks from the peers. These are exactly the same blocks as you see on, say, blockexplorer.com.

5. It passes the new blocks to the wallet and says to it:
"Have a look at these new blocks and see if there are any transactions of interest to you."

6. The wallet looks through the new blocks' transactions and stores (in the wallet) the transactions that either send it bitcoin or that confirm its previous spends.

7. MultiBit stores the headers only of the new blocks into its local copy of the blockchain,   It does not store the transactions themselves. This is the main reason the MultiBit blockchain is so much smaller than the bitcoind blockchain.

8. MultiBit then waits for new blocks to appear from the peers and repeats.

I hope this answers your questions but if anything is not clear just ask.

[brandondayton]

Don't know if this has been suggested before, but it'd be a great feature to see bitcoin value in dollars right in the client. Not super critical, but I think it'll help the regular joe once it gets around to that. BTW, really diggin' multibit. Very slick.

[jim618]

Yes - I think having a 'cross-rate' as per giszmo's suggestion would help usability.

For the early adopter 'bitcoiners' I think they are happy to think in terms of bitcoins but for wider adoption being able to present the info in  a fiat currency would make it easier.  

I will put it on the feature request list in the github wiki.   A single cross-rate where you switch the presentation of all figures (like on a website when you switch from, say, US dollars to euros) would probably be the way to go.   I like giszmo's suggestion of a 'rate-out-of-date' colour scheme too.

brandondayton <- Glad you are enjoying multibit !

:-)

Edit: Idea has been put into wiki: https://github.com/jim618/multibit/wiki/Cross-rates

[jim618]

I thought you might be interested in a sneak preview of what the main wallets page will look like in MultiBit:



There is still a fair amount of finishing off and testing yet but the rough layout is about right I think.
The colour palette used is:
http://colors.bravo9.com/nbs-iscc-p-plochere-color-system/list/all/

[jim618]

Gone into the codebase today is the ability to create swatches with multiple lines in the label.
Here is an example:



Also, the label fields on the 'Receive Bitcoin' and 'Send Bitcoin' screens have been made correspondingly bigger.

[genjix]

Multibit is looking sexy. Keep up the great work

You might want to read these suggestions for improving your client.

[jim618]

Thanks genjix!

Lots of good improvement suggestions on that page - I have bookmarked it for future reference.

Similiarly I am looking forward to the rollout of libbitcoin.  Once devs have a more structured C++ codebase to work with there should be some really interesting solutions appearing.

[GoWest]

Bitcoins for Christmas recommends MultiBit!

[jim618]

Hi GoWest,
Thanks to Bitcoins for Christmas for the recommendation.
That is a great idea for the Christmas season - I think I will use it myself.

 :-)

[finway]

Nice work, I'll try it.

[jim618]

I have tidied up the 'Send Bitcoin' screen so that it now also generates swatches.

Here is a screenshot:



Also, I have added a 'Paste' button into the send 'swatch panel' so that you can paste a text bitcoin URI or swatch directly and it will fill out the send form.

In the very bottom left of the screen you can see that the 'Online' label now also has the block height as a tooltip.

I am hoping to get another beta out early next week, all being well.

[EhVedadoOAnonimato]

but there is a third step, that is when bitcoin really becomes main stream and each block takes up 50+MB. Then most people will be forced to use things like instawallet, mtgox, tradehill for their wallet. The time of Bitcoin banking.

Not necessarily. There are ways of keeping it P2P even then. That would required the creation of a "give me the list of outputs of block X" message. This list would be much smaller than the entire block as it would not contain the inputs, their public keys and signatures.

Of course that a node could then lie about the contents of this list. Such risk could be considerably mitigated by

• Asking the list to different nodes
• Connecting to a set of trusted full nodes
• Clients could offer the user the option to "rescan transactions from this point to that point in time, because I should have received something there". Such manual rescan could perform a full download of all blocks in the period.

The risk could be completely eliminated by adding a checksum of the output list to the block header, but that would be a major change in the protocol. Worth doing, I'd say, if that's what it takes to keep bitcoin truly P2P, and not dependent on trust.

[GoWest]

An issue encountered by someone trying to install MultiBit after receiving a gift from BitcoinsForChristmas:

"Problem: when I launch Multibit it doesn't open - rather, my Nokia App store launches. Even when I launch the JAR file in the Multibit directory."

If you need more details / screenshots, I can try to get them for you.

[jim618]

Hi GoWest,

Thanks for your bug report.

It looks like the Nokia App store is being called when jars are being opened rather than the java executable.   Most likely this will apply to any java app and is not specific to MultiBit.

What system are they running things on ?
Are they running MultiBit from a shortcut (in either their Program Menu or  desktop) or are they double-clicking the multibit-exe.jar.

Regards,

Jim

[conspirosphere.tk]

I just installed Multibit (on XP), but when I click on its shortcut it starts Ovi (a Nokia application to manage my smartphone).
The same happens if I click on the Multibit executable or its uninstaller.
Any clue?

[jim618]

Hi conspirosphere.tk,

It looks like it is this problem: 
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Discussion/showthread.php?184259-How-to-prevent-OVI-Suite-from-hijacking-JAR-filetype-extension

There is a workaround mentioned in that thread:
http://thepanz.netsons.org/post/windows7-jar-file-association-broken-with-nokia-ovi

I have had a look at the bat file it gives and it looks kosher.   Let me know if this fixes the problem.

To fix it for everybody, I think what I will do is convert the multibit-exe.jar to a fully fledged Windows exe file so that Ovi and MultiBit can co-exist happily.

[conspirosphere.tk]

Many thanks Jim,
I just ran the following .reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jar]
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.jar]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.jar]

as indicated on the second page you found, and it fixed everything. So now I can run Multibit.

Thanks again.

[jim618]

That is great conspirosphere.tk

I have just changed the MultiBit build so that for future Windows users they will get an multibit.exe file rather than a jar file.
This will go into 0.2.0beta2.