[ANN] BitcoinSpinner

[niko]

I've been using spinner happily for a month. One detail bugs me: descriptions on Google Play and the wiki repeatedly refer to "private keys" in plural. And yet, from what I see there is only one private key involved, and its corresponding address. The only way to obtain a new key is to erase app data folder, so the new key pair is generated on the next start.

Am I missing something here?

Not really, the client only uses one key at the moment but is more than capable of handling more.  The one key rule has more to do with conserving bitcoin spinner's server resources.

Yes, also that.

Great, thanks. I am happy the way it is now, I was just confused with the description talking about "keys" in plural, and wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

[1714918084]

1714918084

[1714918084]

1714918084

[BoardGameCoin]

I'm getting 'an unexpected error occurred' right after it says 'please wait while the network fee is being calculated' when I try to send bitcoins at the moment. Not sure why this is.

Additionally, there have been several times when I've sent or received bitcoins to a bitcoinspinner recipient of vice-versa and it's taken a half hour before it shows that the coins are on their way.

The first issue is obviously higher priority, but any feedback on either would be appreciated.

Thanks,

-bgc

[BoardGameCoin]

It seems that the 'unexpected error' was caused because apparently the transmission fee is no longer a fixed 0.0005 but is instead calculated, and I didn't have enough in my wallet for the amount I wanted to send + the calculated TX fee. The send worked after I tried smaller values, but the TX fee was 0.01 (although, if the TX fee causes a faster transaction I guess I can't complain... would like to be able to customize it though.

[giszmo]

It seems that the 'unexpected error' was caused because apparently the transmission fee is no longer a fixed 0.0005 but is instead calculated, and I didn't have enough in my wallet for the amount I wanted to send + the calculated TX fee. The send worked after I tried smaller values, but the TX fee was 0.01 (although, if the TX fee causes a faster transaction I guess I can't complain... would like to be able to customize it though.

1bitcent? What the hack? How can that be? In Spinner you should not be able to have huge transactions. anything beyond 0.001 should be a bug, shouldn't it?

[BoardGameCoin]

I misremembered. I checked the transaction and it was a 0.001 fee, not a 0.01.

Sorry for the confusion.

[Jan]

It seems that the 'unexpected error' was caused because apparently the transmission fee is no longer a fixed 0.0005 but is instead calculated, and I didn't have enough in my wallet for the amount I wanted to send + the calculated TX fee. The send worked after I tried smaller values, but the TX fee was 0.01 (although, if the TX fee causes a faster transaction I guess I can't complain... would like to be able to customize it though.

BitcoinSpinner dynamically calculates the fee necessary to guarantee that your transaction gets propagated through the network. The formula is based on the size of your transaction, and basically is 0.0005 * min (1, transaction size in bytes / 1000). If your wallet consists of many small input transactions the transactions you send will be big. So, instead of paying 0.0005 you will pay 0.001 or maybe even more.
So, why do I enforce this instead of letting the end-user decide whatever fee he wishes to pay?
The answer is simple: The end user needs a nice user experience. If I let the end user send with whatever fee he would like then some users would say "Hey, I don't want to pay any stinking fee, I'll send with a zero fee!". The end result would be users with transactions that never reach a miner, as the intermediate nodes would discard them. The end result would be "Hey, BitcoinSpinner is crap, it doesn't work".

So, why are there fees at all? Fees are there for two purposes:
1. They prevent someone from flooding the network with minuscule transactions. AKA DOS attack.
2. They provide miners a reason for mining once the mining reward diminishes.

The fee calculated by BitcoinSpinner only guarantees that your transaction gets propagated through the Bitcoin network (provided that it consists of nodes of the Satoshi client type) it does not however guarantee that your transaction ever gets into a block, but so far this has not been a problem.

Going forward mining fee calculation may get even more complex, as miners will start looking more closely at the fees, and only select the ones with the highest fees. Currently there is a upper limit on how big a block can be, so once the number of transactions get so high that the block size limit kicks in, then miners will only pick the transactions with highest fee pr byte.

Enough of that. Let's get back to what you experienced. You got an "unexpected error" while sending the last cents from your wallet, and as the fee (0.001) was higher than you expected there were not enough funds to send the transaction. That could clearly be handled better by BitcoinSpinner, and I'll look into that.

Thanks for the error report, and I am glad that you found a workaround.

[qxzn]

I'm having a small problem with bitcoinspinner.. I sent some coins to my spinner address a while back yet they never made it out of limbo. Spinner shows them as "coins on their way to you" and has for days.

I checked on blockchain.info and the address does in fact have coins, and the transaction has 500+ confirmations. Any idea what could be the problem?

[Jan]

I'm having a small problem with bitcoinspinner.. I sent some coins to my spinner address a while back yet they never made it out of limbo. Spinner shows them as "coins on their way to you" and has for days.

I checked on blockchain.info and the address does in fact have coins, and the transaction has 500+ confirmations. Any idea what could be the problem?

Please PM me your bitcoin address, and I'll take a look

[qxzn]

Um.. did you do.something? It's fixed now.

[Jan]

BitcoinSpiner has just been updated to version 0.7.2b. You can find the latest version on Google Play or as a direct download for Kindle users.

New Features:

• You can now restore a backup from the clipboard in addition to using a QR-code. When using this feature the clipboard should contain the same text that you get when clicking 'Copy to clipboard' while the backup QR-code is shown.
• Now displaying a message when your device is unable to connect to the server as opposed to just ghosting buttons on the main screen
• Minor bug fixes related to the address book and some UI tweaks

If you happen to attend Bitcoin2012 don't miss my presentation on BitcoinSpinner. I'll be doing an interesting announcement about future development

Enjoy

[molecular]

Looking forward to your talk.

If you happen to attend Bitcoin2012 don't miss my presentation on BitcoinSpinner. I'll be doing an interesting announcement about future development

has to do with bitpay? ;-)

[Jan]

BitcoinSpiner has just been updated to version 0.7.3b. You can find the latest version on Google Play or as a direct download for Kindle users.

New Features:

• Support for sending coins to multisig addresses - With this change BitcoinSpinner creates BIP-0013 (aka p2sh) compliant transactions when sending funds to multisig addresses.
• Backup notifications - Making a backup is really important if you don't want to loose your coins. With this change a backup notification is displayed on the main screen whenever the app is restarted and you have a positive balance. The dialog allows you to disable the notification so you don't get nagged if you have made a backup already
• Address book fixes for Android 2.1

Enjoy

[Uglux]

Thank you for your effort.
Not high priority, but please reconsider the UI.

[Richy_T]

• Backup notifications - Making a backup is really important if you don't want to loose your coins. With this change a backup notification is displayed on the main screen whenever the app is restarted and you have a positive balance. The dialog allows you to disable the notification so you don't get nagged if you have made a backup already

Might be nice to have a bit of intelligence on that. Rather than every time, just when first started and when new keys are added.

[Jan]

• Backup notifications - Making a backup is really important if you don't want to loose your coins. With this change a backup notification is displayed on the main screen whenever the app is restarted and you have a positive balance. The dialog allows you to disable the notification so you don't get nagged if you have made a backup already

Might be nice to have a bit of intelligence on that. Rather than every time, just when first started and when new keys are added.

Making a backup is a one time task. BitcoinSpinner generates its keys from a seed (deterministic), and currently is limited to one bitcoin key-pair. The latter lets BS have a simpler UI.

[Dabs]

Hi Mr BitcoinSpinner author, may I make a request?

Can you add more currencies to display the estimated worth of the bitcoins? A website called localbitcoins.com allows you to "convert" to 150+ different currencies, since it uses the rates found on openexchangerates.com.

My country's currency is not in the list, it only has a dozen or so. I understand those have online exchanges that trade in those currencies, but you can estimate all the others by comparing it to the USD, for example.

And can we choose between last price, low price, high price or weighted average? Since you are getting it from Mt. Gox anyway. I personally prefer a weighted average.

[grazcoin]

BitcoinSpiner has just been updated to version 0.7.3b. You can find the latest version on Google Play or as a direct download for Kindle users.

New Features:

• Support for sending coins to multisig addresses - With this change BitcoinSpinner creates BIP-0013 (aka p2sh) compliant transactions when sending funds to multisig addresses.
• Backup notifications - Making a backup is really important if you don't want to loose your coins. With this change a backup notification is displayed on the main screen whenever the app is restarted and you have a positive balance. The dialog allows you to disable the notification so you don't get nagged if you have made a backup already
• Address book fixes for Android 2.1

Enjoy

Tested: version 0.7.3b is capable of sending funds to multisig address.
An example for a tx is:
http://blockchain.info/tx/368afc1e3be84dd11912c0e90eeacd4395a2d49eddf122d25e3a1aabda5b05f9

Thanks you!

[Icoin]

Devcoin Bounty (DVB) Voting! Please Vote
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101559.msg1268902#msg1268902

DVB is calling its shareholders for the first voting upon a Bounty.

Bounty Vote:
DVB sponsors 9 000 000 DVC for the development of a GPL DVC Android App similar to BitcoinSpinner.

Plus:

...six generation shares to the first developer to make this application...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34586.msg1271093#msg1271093

[niko]

The spinner seems unable to communicate with the server at this moment. It hangs at startup, then "send bitcoins" and "transaction history" buttons are greyed out.

How often has the system been down in recent months? What is the uptime percentage?

[giszmo]

The spinner seems unable to communicate with the server at this moment. It hangs at startup, then "send bitcoins" and "transaction history" buttons are greyed out.

How often has the system been down in recent months? What is the uptime percentage?

Problem persists
Sadsadsad. Spinner is my fav. Hope we soon have bloom filtering so we don't depend on a custom server.