Armory - Discussion Thread

[bit365]

Is there a way to save an image file of a QR code?

Not without taking a screenshot.  Though I was close to figuring out how to put images on the clipboard, but I never quite got it to work.

On the other hand, screenshots aren't so bad.  Both windows and linux, you should be able to <alt>-printscrn or <ctrl>-printscrn and it will put the window in focus on your clipboard which you can then copy into another application.

Will do. Thanks.

[oakpacific]

Thanks Alan, your point about virus just getting keys from RAM makes sense.

Presumably, what you suggested would provide similar benefits as the dynamic keyboard gives you, which is producing a "code" which doesn't have repeated characters and which does not have the equivalent of "shift" presses.  My point is that the dynamic keyboard achieves that for you.

That being said, I think it would be much easier to pick symbols from a paper and input them then using a dynamic keyboard....

I'm not sure I see the difference.  I'm using a 80-character alphabet of "symbols" to represent my password (they just happen to be the same symbols I have on my keyboard).  And I'm displaying those symbols on the screen.  The downside is those symbols are chosen by the user, and have this "shift" key artifact that reduces entropy if someone measures the shift key presses.  And if they have lots of duplicate characters.

But those "weaknesses" are solved by the dynamic keyboard.  I think the only difference is what it "looks" like.  And in the end, using my way (dynamically-changing keyboard), the person still has the option to type it in if they don't really care.

Ah, the difference is that it's easier to input with keyboard than with mouse.

[etotheipi]

Update,

(1) 0.87.9X hasn't gone so smoothly.  It looks like most of the problems are unicode-related (and one bitcoin.conf file problem).  I was planning to fully upgrade Armory to be unicode-friendly with the new wallets, and most people can avoid using unicode in most fields until then... except with this new version.  I have to get some unicode fixes in there, as there's quite a few people who aren't able to use the new version without it!  Hopefully that will resolve a bunch of the problems I've been observing in testing.

(2) I released a signed, 0.87.95 offline bundle, which works for Armory GUI, but not the frag-unfrag scripts.  I included them, but it turns out I made a git merge error and they don't work!  However, I merged things into testing, which includes this, and I'l re-release the offline bundle along with the unicode fixes.

P.S. -- Geezuz, what a day on Gox! 

[13Charlie]

P.S. -- Geezuz, what a day on Gox! 

[picobit]

Did you really mean to post that very relevant picture in this thread?  And if you think this is a ride, try a real crash!  The price "crashed" down to what it was four days ago.  How dramatic!   

[etotheipi]

Did you really mean to post that very relevant picture in this thread?  And if you think this is a ride, try a real crash!  The price "crashed" down to what it was four days ago.  How dramatic!   

Indeed.  I have suspected for a while that the run-up was a bubble, though I expected it to persist a bit longer.  All this media attention came in only last week, and thought there was going to be another couple weeks of people pouring into the system.  Maybe there still will be.  But I'm not afraid of the price "reverting to the mean", only the ensuing media attention which going to cast it into a poor light.  And it's partly justified -- people are going mental, and panicking, and our poor little infrastructure can't handle it!

For reference... 2 months ago I was at about 2,000 downloads/month.  Now I've gotten 2,000 downloads in the last 2-4 days!  I'm also getting a lot more emails and postings about it.  Obvioulsy no one else can respond to the emails, but I request some help responding to postings in the Armory subforum.  I'm going to try to resist the urge to respond to these things immediately, and give others a chance to help me, first.  I'm going to focus on coding

[justusranvier]

I don't think this is a bubble in the classic sense. It's trying to be an adoption curve, but the infrastructure for moving from traditional currencies into bitcoin just can't keep up with demand and isn't scaling quickly enough.

At the moment it's incredibly difficult to buy bitcoins even though many people want to, due to limitations of the legacy financial system.

[etotheipi]

I don't think this is a bubble in the classic sense. It's trying to be an adoption curve, but the infrastructure for moving from traditional currencies into bitcoin just can't keep up with demand and isn't scaling quickly enough.

At the moment it's incredibly difficult to buy bitcoins even though many people want to, due to limitations of the legacy financial system.

Just like in 2011, I'm pretty certain the this event is just the system reverting to mean.  I don't know what the mean is, but it wouldn't surprise me if $266/BTC was $100 real-value + $166 speculator-mania.  If you look at the 2011 bubble, there was actually a fairly smooth growth curve that persisted, underneath the 1,000% bubble.  I'm expecting to see the same thing happen here, but with a "higher" mean, because there was actually a lot of real growth of Bitcoin, underneath the speculation.   I just don't think the real growth reached $250/BTC yet. 

[justusranvier]

The thing about high exchange rates is that they tend to promote real growth. The last set of numbers which BitPay posted showed the order volume they were processing growing at a rate several times faster than the exchange rate was increasing, which is a direct reflection of real economic growth. If we end up spending a prolonged period down at about half the ATH the merchant adoption rate will probably slow.

[wachtwoord]

I don't think this is a bubble in the classic sense. It's trying to be an adoption curve, but the infrastructure for moving from traditional currencies into bitcoin just can't keep up with demand and isn't scaling quickly enough.

At the moment it's incredibly difficult to buy bitcoins even though many people want to, due to limitations of the legacy financial system.

Just like in 2011, I'm pretty certain the this event is just the system reverting to mean.  I don't know what the mean is, but it wouldn't surprise me if $266/BTC was $100 real-value + $166 speculator-mania.  If you look at the 2011 bubble, there was actually a fairly smooth growth curve that persisted, underneath the 1,000% bubble.  I'm expecting to see the same thing happen here, but with a "higher" mean, because there was actually a lot of real growth of Bitcoin, underneath the speculation.   I just don't think the real growth reached $250/BTC yet. 

Intrinsic value isn't limited to current applicability but also the (discounted) worth of the future applications. Just like companies are valued on the discounted value of their future cash flows. Of course the future cash flows are uncertain until they are actually reported. This is also true for Bitcoin. I however believe the future applicability and usage is quite likely to be quite large (it isn't very useful to try to be more accurate).

[etotheipi]

Non-US Users.  Please help me test!  Need unicode/non-en-us users to try it.

Armory 0.87.97-testing!  All testing releases are signed!

The new auto-bitcoind stuff came with a host of critical unicode issues.  In the past, such issues were simply annoying, but didn't actually prevent users from using Armory.  Now it did.  I have upgraded the critical paths to handle unicode, and added warnings for everything else.   One exception to unicode handling is that you cannot use unicode in your bitcoin.conf username or password, and only in Windows!  (it works fine in Linux)  Otherwise, I'm hoping this will go a lot better than before!

See the call for testing help:  
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156250.msg1655941#msg1655941

Improvements from 0.87.95:

-Unicode issues addressed
-New offline bundle for Ubuntu 64-bit
-Frag/unfrag scripts bundled properly now in the offline bundle, I think
-Fixed a problem with existing, partial bitcoin.conf files.

[picobit]

What is the status with respect to testing under MacOS?  Should I build from source, and manage bitcoind/bitcoin-qt myself?

[etotheipi]

What is the status with respect to testing under MacOS?  Should I build from source, and manage bitcoind/bitcoin-qt myself?

I ran into more problems with OSX than expected.  I decided to start over from scratch, but decided I should focus on getting the Linux & Windows stuff out the door before then.  With about 20k downloads per month for Windows, I decided the usability upgrades I have need to be top priority.  I think I'm finally almost there.  Probably tonight or tomorrow I'll take another shot at the OSX build.  I promise it's coming!

[picobit]

Don't rush the OSX for my sake - I am happy with the version I "brewed" a month ago or so - my only incentive for changing something that works well would be to help with testing.

[oakpacific]

Did you really mean to post that very relevant picture in this thread?  And if you think this is a ride, try a real crash!  The price "crashed" down to what it was four days ago.  How dramatic!   

Indeed.  I have suspected for a while that the run-up was a bubble, though I expected it to persist a bit longer.  All this media attention came in only last week, and thought there was going to be another couple weeks of people pouring into the system.  Maybe there still will be.  But I'm not afraid of the price "reverting to the mean", only the ensuing media attention which going to cast it into a poor light.  And it's partly justified -- people are going mental, and panicking, and our poor little infrastructure can't handle it!

For reference... 2 months ago I was at about 2,000 downloads/month.  Now I've gotten 2,000 downloads in the last 2-4 days!  I'm also getting a lot more emails and postings about it.  Obvioulsy no one else can respond to the emails, but I request some help responding to postings in the Armory subforum.  I'm going to try to resist the urge to respond to these things immediately, and give others a chance to help me, first.  I'm going to focus on coding

I don't think the Armory download volume is/was experiencing a bubble, since mostly only people who have done thorough research about bitcoin would be interested in it(many of the long-time bitcoiners I know still have no idea about the advantages of cold storage), it's a sign of growth of educated bitcoin userbase.

[etotheipi]

Did you really mean to post that very relevant picture in this thread?  And if you think this is a ride, try a real crash!  The price "crashed" down to what it was four days ago.  How dramatic!   

Indeed.  I have suspected for a while that the run-up was a bubble, though I expected it to persist a bit longer.  All this media attention came in only last week, and thought there was going to be another couple weeks of people pouring into the system.  Maybe there still will be.  But I'm not afraid of the price "reverting to the mean", only the ensuing media attention which going to cast it into a poor light.  And it's partly justified -- people are going mental, and panicking, and our poor little infrastructure can't handle it!

For reference... 2 months ago I was at about 2,000 downloads/month.  Now I've gotten 2,000 downloads in the last 2-4 days!  I'm also getting a lot more emails and postings about it.  Obvioulsy no one else can respond to the emails, but I request some help responding to postings in the Armory subforum.  I'm going to try to resist the urge to respond to these things immediately, and give others a chance to help me, first.  I'm going to focus on coding

I don't think the Armory download volume is/was experiencing a bubble, since mostly only people who have done thorough research about bitcoin would be interested in it(many of the long-time bitcoiners I know still have no idea about the advantages of cold storage), it's a sign of growth of educated bitcoin userbase.

I think that was the case before they changed bitcoin.org.  Now, it is parallel to Bitcoin-Qt instead of an alternative you have to go hunting for.  Granted, the description says "advanced", but I'm sure lots of people want to try it out anyway...

There's just no other way to describe a 5x-8x increase in volume (bitcoin.org getting 5x-10x more volume and them featuring Armory next to Bitcoin-Qt).  It's pretty awesome, but it makes these usability issues all the more pressing!

[oakpacific]

Did you really mean to post that very relevant picture in this thread?  And if you think this is a ride, try a real crash!  The price "crashed" down to what it was four days ago.  How dramatic!  

Indeed.  I have suspected for a while that the run-up was a bubble, though I expected it to persist a bit longer.  All this media attention came in only last week, and thought there was going to be another couple weeks of people pouring into the system.  Maybe there still will be.  But I'm not afraid of the price "reverting to the mean", only the ensuing media attention which going to cast it into a poor light.  And it's partly justified -- people are going mental, and panicking, and our poor little infrastructure can't handle it!

For reference... 2 months ago I was at about 2,000 downloads/month.  Now I've gotten 2,000 downloads in the last 2-4 days!  I'm also getting a lot more emails and postings about it.  Obvioulsy no one else can respond to the emails, but I request some help responding to postings in the Armory subforum.  I'm going to try to resist the urge to respond to these things immediately, and give others a chance to help me, first.  I'm going to focus on coding

I don't think the Armory download volume is/was experiencing a bubble, since mostly only people who have done thorough research about bitcoin would be interested in it(many of the long-time bitcoiners I know still have no idea about the advantages of cold storage), it's a sign of growth of educated bitcoin userbase.

I think that was the case before they changed bitcoin.org.  Now, it is parallel to Bitcoin-Qt instead of an alternative you have to go hunting for.  Granted, the description says "advanced", but I'm sure lots of people want to try it out anyway...

There's just no other way to describe a 5x-8x increase in volume (bitcoin.org getting 5x-10x more volume and them featuring Armory next to Bitcoin-Qt).  It's pretty awesome, but it makes these usability issues all the more pressing!

Actually, it's already quite surprising that so many people want to run their own clients, rather than relying on third-party services.

[etotheipi]

For anyone interested in the OSX build, here's my first shot at it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175777.0

Qt definitely behaves differently on OSX, requiring some OSX-specific tweaks to the layouts, but it's very usable!

[runeks]

etotheipi, do you have an update on the offline wallet system, where Armory in offline mode is running on an offline device, connected to a PC via a USB-to-serial adapter, and the Armory running in online mode on the PC is able to send transactions to the offline device for signing?

I really want to get this up and running, so I'm interested in hearing how far you are with this, and if there's anything I can do to help.

[chrisrico]

etotheipi, do you have an update on the offline wallet system, where Armory in offline mode is running on an offline device, connected to a PC via a USB-to-serial adapter, and the Armory running in online mode on the PC is able to send transactions to the offline device for signing?

I really want to get this up and running, so I'm interested in hearing how far you are with this, and if there's anything I can do to help.

You can use the offline_server branch of my fork. It's based on etotheipi's latest testing branch.

You'll have to disable the serial TTY on the Pi. I used this guide. Then compile Armory for the Pi. I used this guide. Finally plug the Pi into your computer (it can be powered by the serial cable), transfer the compiled files (from a USB drive, not over the serial cable!) and run extras/offline_serial_server.py (for me it's /dev/ttyAMA0 and baud rate 115200).

For your online computer, you'll have to be in advanced or expert mode, then you can set the device and baud rate in the settings dialog. Once that is complete, you should see the status change to connected in the bottom right. Now, on the dialog from which you can save an offline transaction, you can also transmit it to the offline device. You'll be prompted for the wallet passphrase if your wallet is encrypted. Enter it on the Pi's keyboard. Once the Pi transmits the signed transaction back to your computer, it will automatically advance to the Broadcast dialog.

It should be pretty easy to use, but I created it so maybe that's just me.