Child's Wallet and whitelisting

[francisp]

So my 10yo son has decided he wants to get some Bitcoin. Yes, I am proud.

However, I have set up his account login on our home Mac with parental controls, and I have set up a whitelist of sites he can access. This whitelist extends to all applications, not just his browser. I was going to set up a wallet for him using MultiBit, but I realized that I will need to know what sites it will connect to for communicating with the blockchain in order to put them on the whitelist. Is there a set number of sites, or does it change all the time? I am thinking the nature of the peer-to-peer network might mean the list is always changing. I don't really want to get him a web wallet, but perhaps that is my only choice.

Any help would be appreciated.

[DeathAndTaxes]

His wallet doesn't connect to other "sites" (as in websites) it connect to a completely random set of other wallets (well other wallets running as full nodes). There is no way to white list that as the nodes in the network are continually changing.


One option however would be to install a wallet (technically you just the need "node" so the wallet can be empty) on another machine.  If you can do this then you could restrict his access to just your wallet.

Something like:

(p2p cloud of nodes - unknown set of entities) <--------> (your node - a static known entity)   <-----> (your sons node)

You white list your node and it acts as a bridge.

[francisp]

His wallet doesn't connect to other "sites" (as in websites) it connect to a completely random set of other wallets (well other wallets running as full nodes). There is no way to white list that as the nodes in the network are continually changing.

That is what I suspected.

One option however would be to install a wallet (technically you just the need "node" so the wallet can be empty) on another machine.  If you can do this then you could restrict his access to just your wallet.

Something like:

(p2p cloud of nodes - unknown set of entities) <--------> (your node - a static known entity)   <-----> (your sons node)

You white list your node and it acts as a bridge.

Good idea - I think I'll try to implement that. Thanks for the help!

[odolvlobo]

Perhaps you can whitelist all addresses for only the port that the wallet connects to. That will not whitelist any websites (I assume the wallet doesn't connect via port 80).

[francisp]

Perhaps you can whitelist all addresses for only the port that the wallet connects to. That will not whitelist any websites (I assume the wallet doesn't connect via port 80).

That's a good idea too - I might try that first, as it could be easier to implement and maintain.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Perhaps you can whitelist all addresses for only the port that the wallet connects to. That will not whitelist any websites (I assume the wallet doesn't connect via port 80).

That's a good idea too - I might try that first, as it could be easier to implement and maintain.

Agreed.  If the software you are using supports creating whitelisting rules by port and also supports wildcard for all addresses (i.e. *.*.*.* ) then that will work much better and it will be maintenance free.

You want a rule which allows connections on port 8333 to all computers on the internet.  If you can do that you are done.

[francisp]

For the sake of completeness, I wanted to report how the install/whitelist went. Actually, it was easier than expected.

I use the built-in Parental Controls on the Mac, which allow whitelisting of domains/ip addresses. But although it works through any app, I figured out that it only blocks port 80 (and I assume port 443). So when I installed MultiBit and ran it under my son's restricted login, it just asked me to open up access to multibit.net and bitstamp.net (for the exchange rate listing). The peers automatically connected using port 8333 without any need for tinkering on my part.

My son was very excited when I sent him .00273 BTC after I set it up for him (I owed him about $2 for something and he wanted it paid in Bitcoin).

Thanks for the help everyone!
 

[Sonny]

For the sake of completeness, I wanted to report how the install/whitelist went. Actually, it was easier than expected.

I use the built-in Parental Controls on the Mac, which allow whitelisting of domains/ip addresses. But although it works through any app, I figured out that it only blocks port 80 (and I assume port 443). So when I installed MultiBit and ran it under my son's restricted login, it just asked me to open up access to multibit.net and bitstamp.net (for the exchange rate listing). The peers automatically connected using port 8333 without any need for tinkering on my part.

My son was very excited when I sent him .00273 BTC after I set it up for him (I owed him about $2 for something and he wanted it paid in Bitcoin).

Thanks for the help everyone!
 

Thanks for reporting back.
Yay, we have a new bitcoiner