Hello everybody,
A small experimental project of mine resulted in something small & working and I wanted to share it with you.
The project is called Bitcoin Wallet API (
http://bitcoin-wallet-api.github.io/) and is aimed to provide a uniform, privacy-oriented, restricted access to user's Bitcoin wallets to enable web applications seamless integration with the Bitcoin infrastructure. Think geolocation or camera API for HTML5, but for Bitcoin.
The project is still in its first days and I've published a rough spec draft (
http://bitcoin-wallet-api.github.io/spec/) and made a timestamping demo (you can find a screencast on the homepage). While I've released the source code for the demo (
https://github.com/bitcoin-wallet-api/demos/blob/gh-pages/timestamp/index.html#L56-L107), I need another session to polish the Chrome extension before open sourcing it (it's very rough on the edges). The screencast is shot with this extension.
The reason why I started this project was my personal realization that often, in order to provide non-standard transaction features, web app developers have to go as far as developing a new wallet app so just that their users can sign those transactions. What if there was a way to securely connect web apps and wallets (without exposing private keys)? Would that help new, sophisticated bitcoin web apps go to market faster and have much easier onboarding strategy?
I'm looking forward to your feedback and I'll be happy to answer questions, if any.
Thanks!
Update: I've pushed out the initial proof-of-concept extension implementation (
https://github.com/bitcoin-wallet-api/bitcoin-core-chrome).
Y.
