[ANN] Instawallet is back, alive and well!

[clone4501]

It would be nice if Davout and team would add the fee option like in the regular client when rolling out a future upgrade.

jav - great service and thanks for the support and dependability.

[1714942634]

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[1714942634]

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[Boussac]

Or is all transactions on instawallet logged?

Yes, transactions are all logged by the Bitcoin client itself. <3

The transactions to instawallet was mixed, my coins was transferred to another users account and when withdrawing I received another user's coins. I once followed the transactions of my coins stored on instawallet with blockexplorer.

So chain of transactions with coins purchased with my Mt.Gox account ends up being used to pay for killer wet job instead of buying ganja on SR. And I end up buying ganja with coins that was stolen from allinvain.

I'm pretty sure Instawallet is continuing to run exactly as it was, with no difference. But yeah it'd be good to get confirmation on your question. Instawallet also had the wonderful green address, so you could set up three accounts, send coins between them via green address, and if you do it in different amounts at different times, then I see no way to prove linkage.

It'd also be great if Instawallet would make a policy of destroying all transaction logs after 30 days or something.

Thanks for these suggestions: we will certainly consider them going forward but at the moment we are focused on mobile developments and on rock solid availability even when the service scales up.

[Stephen Gornick]

I see the site still shows "©2011 Jan Vornberger" and the e-mail address shown (presumably for support) is still jan's.

Where should requests for support be directed?

[jav]

I see the site still shows "©2011 Jan Vornberger" and the e-mail address shown (presumably for support) is still jan's.

Where should requests for support be directed?

Davout & co. are still in the progress of transferring everything to a new server. While that is happening I am still mostly dealing with support requests. Once the transfer is complete, they will change the footer as well.

[davout]

We can take support requests at support@bitcoin-central.net as we also have access to the current production server.
We'll probably keep a mention of Jan in the footer or elsewhere to credit him for his brilliant idea and its flawless execution !

Regarding the migration topic, it's in good progress. We want to have as little downtime as possible.

Please bear with us while our future beefed-up production server is being heavily firewalled, secured, booby-trapped and set-up for transparent replication to our failover servers.

[rjk]

Please bear with us while our future beefed-up production server is being heavily firewalled, secured, booby-trapped and set-up for transparent replication to our failover servers.

Will it emit mustard gas if an unsuspecting datacenter monkey pulls the wrong hard drive?

[davout]

Will it emit mustard gas if an unsuspecting datacenter monkey pulls the wrong hard drive?

You're not very far from the truth

[EskimoBob]

bitcoin-central.net? Oh shit, those spammers from India? 
RIP Instawallet.

[davout]

those spammers from India? 

they have been kicked out a long time ago

[apetersson]

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/instawallet.org

looks down from here

[davout]

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/instawallet.org

looks down from here

It times out all the time, because the bitcoin client is choking on the huge pile of accounts it has to keep up to date.

It's been re-engineered and re-written from scratch.

The new version is already online for testing, be my guest

https://instawallet.california.paymium.com

[apetersson]

FYI: main domain seems to be working right now.

[Boussac]

Yes that's the original app until the new version (currently under test) is deployed (hopefully before the end of the week).

[davout]

Cross-posted from this thread

Apart from a couple things left to do the migration is now completed !

Left to do :

• A very small number of accounts (less than 10) need some manual attention to reconcile operations that happened during the time span where bitcoind was listening but the database wasn't properly registering transactions. The accounts in question are identified, if you think your balance is not correct, and if it remains so after 48h have passed please contact me. The reason it might take up to 48h is that the old bitcoind must catch up with the chain after being shut down during the migration, it does so very slowly since it's packed with addresses and accounts. It must be up-to-date with the chain for transaction reconciliation to be accurate.
• The current SSL certificate is valid for https://instawallet.org, a new one will be installed that also validates https://www.instawallet.org

What has been done :

• The backend has been rewritten from scratch to make it much more scalable and responsive. It relies much less on bitcoind, which was a performance bottleneck and delegates the accounting to an SQL database. bitcoind is now only used to notify the backend of incoming transactions, generate an address for each account, and send funds
• Generation transactions are now understood, that means that if you're mining at Eligius, your payouts will be available after 20 confirmations if you direct them to your Instawallet (generations usually take 120 confirmations to mature)
• Balance updates are instant (as previously) but rely on websockets instead of long-polling (if your browser doesn't support WS it will degrade gracefully to long-polling or regular polling)
• A comforting cash-register sound has been added, it plays when you receive funds (except on Safari for iOS)
• Instawallet will now tell you about the confirmed status of your funds, previously you'd get an error message when trying to send, but you had no way to know whether funds were confirmed or not
• The new API is fully backwards compatible with the original API, it will be deprecated at some point but for now it's good enough to me
• The new server is a Intel Xeon 8-cores with 24GB RAM, and a lightning-fast SSD hard-drive. (The previous server had a single-core CPU, 1GB RAM and a regular HDD)
• A paranoid firewall has been set-up, along with serious monitoring, and monitoring of the monitoring
• An iPhone app is available worldwide, for free, in the AppStore, it's called FriendlyPay, it's awesome and it lets you carry Instawallet in your pocket, an Android version is almost ready

If there's anything that should be fixed you may comment here, drop me a line by PM, send me an e-mail at david {at} bitcoin-central.net, or drop by at the office in Boulogne, right near Paris !

I really want to thank Jan Vornberger, Instawallet's previous owner for being very available and responsive during the whole migration process, having thought of such a cool concept, providing me with loads of hand-crafted documentation, and more generally being awesome. He is a gentleman.

Thank you for your attention !

[Stephen Gornick]

Jan Vornberger, Instawallet's previous owner

The whois for the domain doesn't indicate a transfer, which presumably a new owner would want to occur.  The site does now show Paymium of France as the copyright, but that's about the closest to indicating which entity now owns the service.

[davout]

Jan Vornberger, Instawallet's previous owner

The whois for the domain doesn't indicate a transfer, which presumably a new owner would want to occur.  The site does now show Paymium of France as the copyright, but that's about the closest to indicating which entity now owns the service.

The whois shows Jan as registrant, and shows Paymium as technical and admin contacts. Looks correct to me.

[Stephen Gornick]

Jan Vornberger, Instawallet's previous owner

The whois for the domain doesn't indicate a transfer, which presumably a new owner would want to occur.  The site does now show Paymium of France as the copyright, but that's about the closest to indicating which entity now owns the service.

The whois shows Jan as registrant, and shows Paymium as technical and admin contacts. Looks correct to me.

Let me try being a little more clear with my question.

When I send bitcoins to my InstaWallet, someone is holding onto my bitcoins.

So if there is a problem, I might want to know who owns InstaWallet.

That is my question.  Who (what legal entity) owns InstaWallet?

[davout]

Let me try being a little more clear with my question.

When I send bitcoins to my InstaWallet, someone is holding onto my bitcoins.

So if there is a problem, I might want to know who owns InstaWallet.

That is my question.  Who (what legal entity) owns InstaWallet?

Paymium SAS owns Instawallet. I'm its CTO.
If you want precise legal information and access to incorporation documents you can have a look on the official French company directory at infogreffe.fr

[Trader Steve]

A dual currency display option would be nice - like the one at EasyWallet.org. It eliminates the need for mental math currency conversions. Glad to see you are devoting resources to keep this alive. As I've mentioned elsewhere, banner ads and/or corporate sponsorship seem like good revenue models.

[Trader Steve]

Davout, if I understand it correctly, you are also developing the Paytunia ewallet. Out of curiosity, can you explain your motivation for developing two ewallets simultaneously? Would InstaWallet be your "simple" product and Paytunia be your "deluxe" product?