Masterchest Wallet Alpha Testing Thread

[ripper234]

Thanks,Ron. I got it. By the way, I like the MSC project very much and look forward to your Omniwallet.

Thanks, your support is appreciated!

Little under 24 hours for the DEx launch! (block 290630)

[zathras]

Alpha 0.3 is up.  OP updated.

[IamNotSure]

I read somewhere that one can download a "reparsed" database to speed up the parsing process. Any link available ?

Don't want to wait 24+ hours to try the DEX

[subSTRATA]

Few issues with Alpha 0.3 on Win7 64-bit:

1. Initial draft .pdf says "NOTE: If you have customized your bitcoin installation (for example by using the --datadir flag to change the location of
your bitcoin configuration and database) you may need to specify your configuration manually. To do so simply change the four values in wallet.cfg
from empty to your chosen bitcoin RPC server configuration" but that is not true, if one is using non-default datadir than a new line must be added
to file in question. Only this one worked for me:

bitcoinrpcserv=localhost
bitcoinrpcport=8332
bitcoinrpcuser=(username_goes_here)
bitcoinrpcpass=(password_goes_here)
datadir=D:\BitcoinData

Omitting any data or line makes Masterchest complain and shutdown or keep on running but doing nothing.

2. Once Masterchest is started and starts syncing with blockchain, switching to "debug" tab and clicking on DEBUG LEVEL: LOW changes it to MED
and Masterchest becomes unresponsive including minimizing wallet window. It will start accepting user input only after syncing is fully done. Same
unresponsivness occurs once Masterchest starts to print debug text while on MED or HIGH setting. It is impossible to stop printing, it just goes worse
since user can only switch LOW to MED to HIGH level, not MED to LOW or OFF (which does not even exists).

3. Taskbar name for Masterchest is Form1

4. On "currencies" tab amount of coins is wrong, instead of 0.00125 MSC and 4.04268975 BTC it shows I have 125.00 MSC and 404268975.00 BTC

5. Right and bottom sides of main and other windows look wrong, see https://i.imgur.com/7W619QT.png

[zathras]

I read somewhere that one can download a "reparsed" database to speed up the parsing process. Any link available ?

Don't want to wait 24+ hours to try the DEX

All current binary downloads have a pre-seeded database to avoid the need to reparse everything.  Still requires enabling the transaction index though (please see the instructions included).

Thanks
Zathras

[zathras]

Thanks for testing  Comments in-line.

Thanks
Zathras

Few issues with Alpha 0.3 on Win7 64-bit:

1. Initial draft .pdf says "NOTE: If you have customized your bitcoin installation (for example by using the --datadir flag to change the location of
your bitcoin configuration and database) you may need to specify your configuration manually. To do so simply change the four values in wallet.cfg
from empty to your chosen bitcoin RPC server configuration" but that is not true, if one is using non-default datadir than a new line must be added
to file in question. Only this one worked for me:

bitcoinrpcserv=localhost
bitcoinrpcport=8332
bitcoinrpcuser=(username_goes_here)
bitcoinrpcpass=(password_goes_here)
datadir=D:\BitcoinData

Omitting any data or line makes Masterchest complain and shutdown or keep on running but doing nothing.

The 'datadir=' line is not read from wallet.cfg anywhere in the code, so I'm not sure how that would be possible.  Likely to be something else you changed at the same time.  FYI, The wallet only talks to bitcoin over RPC (a network communication channel), so where bitcoin itself stores its data on disk is irrelevant.  Auto-detection works by attempting to read %appdata%\bitcoin\bitcoin.conf for the RPC details, failing that it falls back to reading those four entries from wallet.cfg.

2. Once Masterchest is started and starts syncing with blockchain, switching to "debug" tab and clicking on DEBUG LEVEL: LOW changes it to MED
and Masterchest becomes unresponsive including minimizing wallet window. It will start accepting user input only after syncing is fully done. Same
unresponsivness occurs once Masterchest starts to print debug text while on MED or HIGH setting. It is impossible to stop printing, it just goes worse
since user can only switch LOW to MED to HIGH level, not MED to LOW or OFF (which does not even exists).

Ron raised a bug about this as well, but I don't see this behaviour locally.  I'm going to spin up a few VM's to try and replicate behaviour - machine/OS specs would be helpful.  Thanks

3. Taskbar name for Masterchest is Form1

Haha thanks, yes - so it is.  Will correct in next commit.

4. On "currencies" tab amount of coins is wrong, instead of 0.00125 MSC and 4.04268975 BTC it shows I have 125.00 MSC and 404268975.00 BTC

DexX raised this as well - do you usually use a comma instead of a period for decimal notation in your locale?  I've done some work to cultures which has corrected things like the chart etc in these locales, but the currencies tab still doesn't format properly.  I think DexX mentioned the numbers look OK elsewhere and the currencies overview is the only affected view - is that what you're seeing too?

5. Right and bottom sides of main and other windows look wrong, see https://i.imgur.com/7W619QT.png

Ahh - do you by chance have your font size set in (system) display settings above 100%?  If so that's the cause, I'm looking into this also.

[IamNotSure]

I read somewhere that one can download a "reparsed" database to speed up the parsing process. Any link available ?

Don't want to wait 24+ hours to try the DEX

All current binary downloads have a pre-seeded database to avoid the need to reparse everything.  Still requires enabling the transaction index though (please see the instructions included).

Thanks
Zathras

Great ! I was worry to overwrite the wallet.sdf file, so I left the old one, that explained how he was still trying to rebuild from scratch.

Many thanks, will test the DEX right now !

edit : in the send tab, drop down menu, the same address is displayed multiple times (everytime an operation is done, it adds a clone to the list)

edit : if I unlock my bitcoin wallet, masterchest still asks for my passphrase (it is independent I guess?)

[zathras]

I read somewhere that one can download a "reparsed" database to speed up the parsing process. Any link available ?

Don't want to wait 24+ hours to try the DEX

All current binary downloads have a pre-seeded database to avoid the need to reparse everything.  Still requires enabling the transaction index though (please see the instructions included).

Thanks
Zathras

Great ! I was worry to overwrite the wallet.sdf file, so I left the old one, that explained how he was still trying to rebuild from scratch.

Many thanks, will test the DEX right now !

edit : in the send tab, drop down menu, the same address is displayed multiple times (everytime an operation is done, it adds a clone to the list)

edit : if I unlock my bitcoin wallet, masterchest still asks for my passphrase (it is independent I guess?)

OK, great - thanks!

I'll see if I can hunt down the bug that causes the same address to be displayed multiple times - those dropdowns have been modified in a recent change in response to some feedback from Ron (request to add the balance for each address).

Re passphrase - at the moment if you just leave the passphrase empty for an unlocked wallet it should be OK (it'll skip attempting to unlock the wallet if the passphrase is blank).  I do have a line item on my todo list which improves the UX handling of this.  If you're interested basically I can use the 'getinfo' RPC call which includes amid its JSON attribute pairs an attribute called 'unlocked_until'.  I intend to use this call to determine if the wallet is unlocked (and whether it will remain unlocked while we sign and broadcast) prior to throwing up the passphrase request.  TL:DR; it's on the list, just not massively high in terms of priority but should make it into one of the next few alphas no doubt.

Thanks
Zathras

[zathras]

Hey guys,

Alpha 0.3C is up.  OP updated.

This update focuses on:
* Major improvements in processing performance - parsing is about the same but my benchmarks show 200%+ improvement in processing - thus makes an up to date client much faster to use
* Hash based chain re-org protection (upgraded from always roll-back 5 blocks to storing hashes for blocks we process DB local and then comparing with bitcoind/qt when we start scanning)
* Some UI improvements, bugfixes

Thanks
Zathras

[dexX7]

Looks good so far, the processing was indeed much much faster. And the progress bars are awesome!

What still remains is the problem with "," and "." interpretation of balances within the balance overview which shows super high amounts.

And I tested something else what normally shouldn't happen, but this may be handled nevertheless:

I'm using different wallets and I used the MSC wallet with Masterchest, then deleted all Masterchest folders, downloaded the new GitHub version, but changed the wallet.dat inbetween. After starting the new version for some reasons the addresses from the MSC wallet were still shown under addresses, but if I try to send coins, it only shows those from the new wallet. I'm actually a bit surprised, because I deleted also the wallet.sdf etc.

[zathras]

Looks good so far, the processing was indeed much much faster. And the progress bars are awesome!

Thanks - have been wanting to get this out (but crazy couple of days as you know!) because I knew there was some low hanging fruit for optimization (+little indexing sprinkled here and there helps a lot!).

What still remains is the problem with "," and "." interpretation of balances within the balance overview which shows super high amounts.

Ah yes, been meaning to simulate that (setting a locale in a VM that has , instead of . so I can replicate myself & test).  Remind me again does it also do that on the currencies panel?

And I tested something else what normally shouldn't happen, but this may be handled nevertheless:

I'm using different wallets and I used the MSC wallet with Masterchest, then deleted all Masterchest folders, downloaded the new GitHub version, but changed the wallet.dat inbetween. After starting the new version for some reasons the addresses from the MSC wallet were still shown under addresses, but if I try to send coins, it only shows those from the new wallet. I'm actually a bit surprised, because I deleted also the wallet.sdf etc.

Hmm, we enumerate addresses via multiple RPC methods (because contrary to the bitcoin-core doco, listaddresses does not return all addresses - for example change) but then we check every one via the validateaddress RPC call, using the ismine:true condition before adding to the address stack.  Could you do me a favour?  In your bitcoin install run the command validateaddress address on one of your MSC addresses while in your other wallet.  I can't see any way that bitcoin would return anything other than ismine:false for that but good to check.

I'm also trying to think of other ways this could occur.

Thanks as always for testing
Zathras

P.S.  You can interchange wallet.dat as much as you like (as long as the wallet isn't running of course) - wallet.sdf holds no unique information (otherwise we'd need to encrypt it, back it up etc).  Technically calling Masterchest a wallet is a bit of a misnomer, bitcoind/qt is the wallet, Masterchest just overlays an extra layer of functionality over the top (thus allowing me to conveniently inherit the security of the bitcoin-core wallet )

FYI:

Code:

    Public Function getaddresses(ByVal bitcoin_con As bitcoinrpcconnection)
        Dim addresslist As New List(Of btcaddressbal)
        Dim plainaddresslist, myaddresslist As New List(Of String)

        'first use listreceivedbyaddress 0 true to get 'all addresses'
        Dim addresses As rcvaddress = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(Of rcvaddress)(rpccall(bitcoin_con, "listreceivedbyaddress", 2, 0, True, 0))
        For Each result In addresses.result
            plainaddresslist.Add(result.address.ToString)
        Next
        'since documentation is wrong and this does not list all addresses (eg change), use listunspent to gather up any addresses not returned by listreceivedbyaddress
        Dim listunspent As unspent = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(Of unspent)(rpccall(bitcoin_con, "listunspent", 2, 0, 999999, 0))
        For Each result In listunspent.result
            If Not plainaddresslist.Contains(result.address.ToString) Then 'avoid duplicates
                plainaddresslist.Add(result.address.ToString)
            End If
        Next
        'list_received_byaaddress also returns addresses transactions have been sent to (???) - run additional ismine check on each address
        For Each address As String In plainaddresslist
            Dim validate As validate = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(Of validate)(rpccall(bitcoin_con, "validateaddress", 1, address, 0, 0))
            If validate.result.ismine = True Then
                myaddresslist.Add(address)
            End If
        Next
...

[fordlincoln]

So, after about 3 days of sync'ing the wallet I tried to do a send of TMSC. The response was that there's not enough funds in my wallet to cover the tx fee.
I got about 0.0004 BTC in that address.. What is the tx fee set to? 0.001?

There are additional costs beyond just the miners fee (which is set at 0.00011) for funding the outputs for the transaction.  The library currently requires an unspent output >the total fee (~0.00035-0.00040 BTC) in order to send a transaction.

I actually wrote an appendix regarding the cost of Master Protocol messages, you can read it here if you're interested https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec#appendix-e---understanding-the-cost-of-master-protocol-messages

Thanks
Zathras

Zathras - Thanks for pointing this out, as I wasn't sure how the Miners fees were being handled with MSC transactions

[dexX7]

After reimporting the other wallet.dat again, I think I was fooled by my own perception. Both share same transactions, thus the impression of a similar transaction history as well as many addresses with tiny balances etc..

I went through every view and added a bunch of notes, you'll find the part about the floating point delimter there, too: https://i.imgur.com/lffLvCB.png


Edit: found the delimiter problem: DataTables appearingly use their own localization information and overwrite even what was defined on a thread scope. Quickfix: currencylist.Locale = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture in the module file.

[zathras]

After reimporting the other wallet.dat again, I think I was fooled by my own perception. Both share same transactions, thus the impression of a similar transaction history as well as many addresses with tiny balances etc..

I went through every view and added a bunch of notes, you'll find the part about the floating point delimter there, too: https://i.imgur.com/lffLvCB.png


Edit: found the delimiter problem: DataTables appearingly use their own localization information and overwrite even what was defined on a thread scope. Quickfix: currencylist.Locale = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture in the module file.

Legend DexX - added.

Thanks
Zathras

EDIT: Notes are extremely useful, thanks

On the 'ugly' scrollbars - couldn't agree more however since this is WinForms and not WPF repainting scrollbars is very scrappy/hacky I think - if you have any suggestions here I'm open to them absolutely.

[zathras]

Build 0021 is up.

Minor bugfixes and some UI improvements (thanks for all the suggestions!).

Thanks
Zathras

[dexX7]

I love you for the animated sync icon...

And I see you adopted some of my suggestions. Thanks!

A general question: is there a reason that you show TMSC as default in the DEX? Also the balances in the addresses view have the order "BTC", "TMSC", "MSC" - I'd almost say: switch it! MSC is the most important one, BTC the least important one. I think.

About the support page: it would be very interesting to see how often it's opened. I read in the main thread that some said "all wallets are not very usable" (I disagree!), so this would be a tool to get some real numbers to falsify this fact.

Maybe this is a crazy idea, but what do you think about some kind of text box on the support landing page and after a user submitted his problem it is forwarded to a newly created mailing list (e.g. support at mastercoin.org). And volunteers could sign up to respond to those support requests? I think Dom is probably the right person who is able to evaluate such an idea?

[zathras]

I love you for the animated sync icon...

And I see you adopted some of my suggestions. Thanks!

A general question: is there a reason that you show TMSC as default in the DEX? Also the balances in the addresses view have the order "BTC", "TMSC", "MSC" - I'd almost say: switch it! MSC is the most important one, BTC the least important one. I think.

About the support page: it would be very interesting to see how often it's opened. I read in the main thread that some said "all wallets are not very usable" (I disagree!), so this would be a tool to get some real numbers to falsify this fact.

Maybe this is a crazy idea, but what do you think about some kind of text box on the support landing page and after a user submitted his problem it is forwarded to a newly created mailing list (e.g. support at mastercoin.org). And volunteers could sign up to respond to those support requests? I think Dom is probably the right person who is able to evaluate such an idea?

Hehe I wasted about an hour rotating that original sync icon a bunch of times to make an animation but the result was pretty poor - I think the new (properly generated) one looks much better - thanks for the ideas

I can change some of the defaults around, I think there is an issue for that already.

I could always grep the logs for the number of times that page is hit if needed sure.

Doing some sort of ticketing is great if a reasonable turnaround can be achieved - the difficulty with things today is people want their answers (now! now! now!) and even say 8 hours which used to be a good customer service turnaround is seen as slow (not that many in the crypto world deliver service even close to same day though!).

I think a decent FAQ needs to be added to that support landing page at minimum though.

EDIT: Perhaps that's expecting a bit much (8 hrs) - this is a very young industry after all - too much time in the day job negotiating SLAs with helpdesk

[instinctIS]

Nice app, congrats. However there is this issue that goes with your app but also others on Win8 x64 IE10 , and that is the error 500 which is returned by the bitcoin wallet/server .
As have said, the same behavior goes with any other rpc apps that are connecting via Explorer , and on the other hand all that are connecting via php or made in SciTE are passing just right.

http://seo2url.com/to_delete/500.png

Any ideas on why this happen are welcome, since they will help you + me + others.

[zathras]

Nice app, congrats. However there is this issue that goes with your app but also others on Win8 x64 IE10 , and that is the error 500 which is returned by the bitcoin wallet/server .
As have said, the same behavior goes with any other rpc apps that are connecting via Explorer , and on the other hand all that are connecting via php or made in SciTE are passing just right.



Any ideas on why this happen are welcome, since they will help you + me + others.

I notice you're running build 0019, try the latest (0021) it has retry capability in the RPC calls if your bitcoin installation doesn't respond on the first try.  It's doubtful this will solve your issue (as it's an internal server error not connection error) but always good to be running the latest build.

Also, could you post the output on the debug panel?  

What antivirus platform are you running?  I've seen a few interfere with comms to RPC.  Any firewalling on the interface for bitcoin RPC? Is bitcoin fairly vanilla - any customization?  There are still some things that Masterchest won't support, for example force using IPv6 instead of IPv4 in bitcoin-core may cause problems (if you don't know what that is then don't worry you won't be using it).

Once we see which step it's up to in the debug panel perhaps I can give you a build with extra debugging at that step to shep some light on what's going on.  We do have users on Win8 x64 (unsure if IE10) using the wallet successfully, so I'm not sure if it's something specific to your local environment.

Thanks
Zathras

[nuffsaid420]

Hello,

I am working on an outdated Windows XP, not sure if that has anything to do with it. I am getting errors with the Mastercoin wallet syncing. I keep getting errors. I can clear the errors and it seems to keep syncing. It seems to be the same one that instinctIS is getting.
Also I cannot change the DEBUG level from low. When I click on the LOW item it doesnt do anything.




And the full debug log:

MASTERCHEST WALLET v0.3c
[2014-03-30T08:34:26] DEBUG: Thread 'workthread' starting...
[2014-03-30T08:34:26] STATUS: Connection to bitcoin RPC established & sanity check OK.
[2014-03-30T08:34:26] STATUS: Connection to database established & sanity check OK.
[2014-03-30T08:34:28] STATUS: Database starting at block 292433
[2014-03-30T08:34:28] STATUS: Network is at block 293247
[2014-03-30T08:34:28] STATUS: 815 blocks to catch up
[2014-03-30T08:34:28] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292433
[2014-03-30T08:34:35] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292434
[2014-03-30T08:37:26] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292435
[2014-03-30T08:37:30] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292436
[2014-03-30T08:37:31] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292437
[2014-03-30T08:40:24] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292438
[2014-03-30T08:40:31] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292439
[2014-03-30T08:40:42] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292440
[2014-03-30T08:40:49] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292441
[2014-03-30T08:40:52] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292442
[2014-03-30T08:41:05] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292443
[2014-03-30T08:41:34] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292444
[2014-03-30T08:41:46] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292445
[2014-03-30T08:41:58] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292446
[2014-03-30T08:42:11] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292447
[2014-03-30T08:42:14] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292448
[2014-03-30T08:42:23] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292449
[2014-03-30T08:42:39] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292450
[2014-03-30T08:42:49] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292451
[2014-03-30T08:43:03] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292452
[2014-03-30T08:43:18] BLOCKSCAN: Found MSC transaction (simple send): b2b1cf6d81a5e6cb5a80426f5ac0c18f6b468a4b8b5c685254499d2d9afc895d
[2014-03-30T08:43:24] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292453
[2014-03-30T08:43:31] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292454
[2014-03-30T08:43:50] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292455
[2014-03-30T08:44:09] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292456
[2014-03-30T08:44:19] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292457
[2014-03-30T08:56:39] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292458
[2014-03-30T08:56:42] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292459
[2014-03-30T08:56:44] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292460
[2014-03-30T08:56:45] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292461
[2014-03-30T08:56:48] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292462
[2014-03-30T08:56:50] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292463
[2014-03-30T08:57:04] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292464
[2014-03-30T08:57:05] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292465
[2014-03-30T08:57:18] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292466
[2014-03-30T08:57:31] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292467
[2014-03-30T08:57:35] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292468
[2014-03-30T08:57:38] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292469
[2014-03-30T08:57:40] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292470
[2014-03-30T08:57:41] BLOCKSCAN: Found MSC transaction (simple send): 8b1a3158b56a38ddb023e2199760654e8e36cd65a1b302628248d865dde96378
[2014-03-30T08:57:42] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292471
[2014-03-30T08:57:49] BLOCKSCAN: Found MSC transaction (simple send): 82cf64378f6d15f1f5595961bf76a71fd2358a343e09cb451a81891e848ccb3b
[2014-03-30T08:57:49] BLOCKSCAN: Found MSC transaction (simple send): a4197db8c2c9a2d9b1f9985f6b7a5bd0595a82a2533672c6b276971df1df4c60
[2014-03-30T08:57:53] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292472
[2014-03-30T08:57:59] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292473
[2014-03-30T08:58:00] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292474
[2014-03-30T08:58:12] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292475
[2014-03-30T08:58:34] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292476
[2014-03-30T08:58:39] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292477
[2014-03-30T08:58:40] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292478
[2014-03-30T08:58:42] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292479
[2014-03-30T08:58:56] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292480
[2014-03-30T08:58:57] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292481
[2014-03-30T09:08:52] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292482
[2014-03-30T09:09:05] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292483
[2014-03-30T09:09:18] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292484
[2014-03-30T09:09:24] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292485
[2014-03-30T09:09:29] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292486
[2014-03-30T09:09:54] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292487
[2014-03-30T09:09:57] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292488
[2014-03-30T09:10:27] DEBUG: Block Analysis for: 292489