[ANNOUNCE] Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin Client

[Lumpy]

Different clients have different features and "selling points." Electrum gives more information than some other clients, such as Bitcoin-qt and Multibit. Whether that information is useful or confusing is somewhat a matter of preference. The same could be said of certain features, such as freezing/prioritizing addresses.

[bitcats]

Same applies to the concept of "change" addresses. Those familar with how Bitcoin works may know that it is. For the other users, some carefully chosen words of explanation would make the big difference in user experience. Note that, if I understand correctly, the concept of a separate set of change addresses is not a necessity of the bitcoin protocol as such. It is just an implementation variant (also chosen by the satoshi client if I understand correctly) to make tracking of bitcoin flows a little bit more difficult to track. But in principle I could use any address in my wallet, possibly also the paying address itself (?), as change address for a payment.

Quod vide: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=73651.msg921121#msg921121

A small and comprehensible tutorial for to the "normal" user (PDF, 3-4 pages) would be really helpful.

[ThomasV]

...

I mostly agree.
Please note that the gtk version of Electrum has help buttons; my plan is to add them to the qt gui too.
also, these "advanced" features will not be enabled by default

[ThomasV]

option 2) offer to help them out. When you do figure out how something works and documentation is deficient, write it up and email it to him. at least then all he has to do it cut and paster.

My opinion is that documentation is often better when non-devs contribute to it.
Not because developers are always bad at writing docs, but because someone with an external look, who does not share the developer's implicit goals, can provide better explanations.

Note that the Electrum documentation and the translation project are on the wiki; this so that anyone can participate.

[bitcats]

My opinion is that documentation is often better when non-devs contribute to it.
Not because developers are always bad at writing docs, but because someone with an external look, who does not share the developer's implicit goals, can provide better explanations

 Thats right!

[Xenland]

My opinion is that documentation is often better when non-devs contribute to it.
Not because developers are always bad at writing docs, but because someone with an external look, who does not share the developer's implicit goals, can provide better explanations

 Thats right!

Yeah that's true but it also looks lazy to most people or personally to me it looks like the developer is just programming that program just for fun.

Albeit if you provided a wiki page with 20% complete information others would help contribute over time page by page. Heck if their was something I could write on I might even contribute right now....  How do I help contribute to documentation is their a page I can be referred to??

[Tuxavant]

How do I help contribute to documentation is their a page I can be referred to??

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Electrum

[ThomasV]

Version 0.55 is out.

As announced yesterday, advanced features are now available only through an 'expert mode'
The expert mode is activated by a checkbox in the user preferences.

Features available in the expert mode:
 * freeze/prioritize addresses
 * the 'receive' tab shows change addresses ('change' tab is gone)
 * the 'receive' and 'contacts' tab have extra columns ('flags', 'balance', 'Tx'). A new 'flags' column describes the status of an address: Imported, Change or default, Frozen or Prioritized
 * the 'receive' tab has a 'new' button that allows to create new addresses by raising the wallet's gap limit. Note that the gap limit can be lowered too. The dialog also displays the minimum value of the gap limit that can be set without losing any of your current addresses (this assumes you are connected, because it needs to compute the maximal gap of your sequence of addresses)

Gui changes:
 * The buttons for address-related actions have been replaced with contextual menus

Console mode changes:
 * new commands to freeze/unfreeze, prioritize/unprioritize an address.
 * address flags are also displayed with 'electrum addresses' in the console

Enjoy!

[rjk]

Apparently MNW's Ellet device runs a version of Electrum. Will it be easy to upgrade the code as you update it frequently?

[ThomasV]

Apparently MNW's Ellet device runs a version of Electrum. Will it be easy to upgrade the code as you update it frequently?

I do not know if they use the same codebase for their client.
but the client-server protocol is stable, so they do not need to upgrade their code frequently.

[bitfoo]

Version 0.55 is out.

Fantastic! Only one question: why is there no prominent donation address for the electrum client itself? Is it the same as the address for the ecdsa.org node?

[Tuxavant]

Fantastic! Only one question: why is there no prominent donation address for the electrum client itself? Is it the same as the address for the ecdsa.org node?

I really like where this is going. That's the address I've been using... .36 just sent.

[bitcats]

Great! Congratulations!
Is it possible to use the freeze/prioritize commands with a change address?

[ThomasV]

Great! Congratulations!
Is it possible to use the freeze/prioritize commands with a change address?

yes it is.
change addresses have a C flag

[flatfly]

Awesome release. And it's great that the advanced features are disabled by default, to avoid confusing new users.

Win-optimized builds will only be pushed late Sunday I believe.  But PM me if you need early access, and I'll see what I can do.

[marcus_of_augustus]

ThomasV : how extensible is Electrum?

I know it is written in python, correct? Is the code quite 'modular'?

Background: doing some build testing for Open-Transactions and there is a build that supplies a client API as a python module. If your env is set-up correctly you can simply do a

Code:

import _otapi

then calls to the "_otapi.so" library of client commands can be made from the python program.

Also there is suite of scripts (for financial transactions, contracts, asset issuance, etc) already built on top of the client API that maybe leveraged (and more being built).

Thnx.

[marcus_of_augustus]

BTW : I wrote a doc on how to build and install electrum from source on Fedora 15 (probably work on other RH-derivatives also).

Code:

# Set-up dev. env
#
# use yum-ex and get packages PyQt4 PyQt4-devel
# or on command line

$ sudo yum install PyQt4 PyQt4-devel

# separately do same for packages python-setuptools python-pip

$ sudo yum install python-setuptools python-pip

# Install python modules ecdsa slowaes (crypto stuff)

$ sudo easy_install ecdsa
$ sudo easy_install slowaes


# Fetch the electrum project from gitorious
#
$ git clone git://gitorious.org/electrum/electrum.git


$ cd electrum

# build locally QT-icons into electrum/lib/

$ pyrcc4 icons.qrc -o lib/icons_rc.py

# build and install electrum python module

$ sudo python setup.py install 


### go home and play :)

$ cd

$ electrum

[MadSweeney]

Version 0.55 is out.

sudo pip install --upgrade --no-deps http://ecdsa.org/electrum/Electrum-latest.tar.gz

\o/

[flatfly]

OK, I did find some time to make the Windows builds for 0.55. Available now!

[bitcats]

Is it somehow possible to use the paying (sending) address itself as change address? What if i freeze the change address, where does the change go then?