New, simple online wallet: www.instawallet.org - no signup required

[jav]

any plans to include a namecoin Instawallet?

Not at the moment, no.

how about allowing those small transfers from one Instawallet to another to be allowed  (i.e., the transfer is allowed if the target address is also on InstaWallet)?

Yes, I will try and tackle this soon (detecting internal transfers and dealing with them differently).

[jav]

Quick update: Internal payments (from one Instawallet to another) are now detected and treated differently: They are instantaneous and amounts down to 1 Satoshi are possible.

[naypalm]

Anyone else getting a timeout error? occurred at 3:11PM EST

[bbit]

this site has bit the dust ... I wonder if anyone lost bitcoins ?

[qikaifu]

I guess this is still a 1-step authentication method to protect people's money from stealing.
Maybe jav should add some username and password system to make it both safe and convenient.

The browsers do record the history, and lots of users do share their computers with other people

[jav]

Anyone else getting a timeout error? occurred at 3:11PM EST

Yes, I just noticed that the site was down for a number of hours. Sorry about that. It's back up again now. Unfortunately I'm not sure what caused the crash, so it might happen again. :-/

[done]

it's back up 

[Oldminer]

Down again...sigh

[jav]

Quoted from the downtime thread (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13230 - I will post downtime related updates only over there in the future):

It's back up.. for the moment. You guys are putting too much load on it by using it so much. ;-)

Seriously though, I'm running into a number of scaling issues which show that the Bitcoin daemon hasn't really been used in production (large wallet.dat) much. I'm afraid there isn't an over-night fix for this, so the site might be flaky over the next days/weeks until I can figure out some solutions and/or workarounds.

Thanks for this service by the way, it's really useful and (so far) dependable.

Thx for the encouragement. I'm glad it's useful to some people. Sorry about the downtime. I hope I can return to the previous level of stability once this growing pain is sorted out.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Quoted from the downtime thread (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13230 - I will post downtime related updates only over there in the future):

It's back up.. for the moment. You guys are putting too much load on it by using it so much. ;-)

Seriously though, I'm running into a number of scaling issues which show that the Bitcoin daemon hasn't really been used in production (large wallet.dat) much. I'm afraid there isn't an over-night fix for this, so the site might be flaky over the next days/weeks until I can figure out some solutions and/or workarounds.

Thanks for this service by the way, it's really useful and (so far) dependable.

Thx for the encouragement. I'm glad it's useful to some people. Sorry about the downtime. I hope I can return to the previous level of stability once this growing pain is sorted out.

jav,

what's your business model for this great service?

How do you expect for pay for it when/if it scales up to appreciable cost size?

thnx.

[jav]

what's your business model for this great service?

How do you expect for pay for it when/if it scales up to appreciable cost size?

I don't have a business model at the moment. It's just a spare time project to help Bitcoin gain some traction.

I'll see how it develops. Maybe other services/solutions will make Instwallet obsolete, maybe I'll find a way to finance it that I'm happy with or maybe it will just run on donations.

For the moment the scaling issues aren't so much "lots of users", but more "really inefficient algorithms" (in some parts of the Bitcoin daemon). As I mention, that will take some time to sort out, but fundamentally the service should be able to run on very few resources to serve current demand.

On that note, I am considering throwing hardware at the problem to buy myself some time. Maybe get a dedicated server for 3 months. That would probably require around 10 BTC in donations. Would you guys be interested in that or would you rather deal with a little downtime here and there?

[elk-tamer]

For the moment the scaling issues aren't so much "lots of users", but more "really inefficient algorithms" (in some parts of the Bitcoin daemon). As I mention, that will take some time to sort out, but fundamentally the service should be able to run on very few resources to serve current demand.

On that note, I am considering throwing hardware at the problem to buy myself some time. Maybe get a dedicated server for 3 months. That would probably require around 10 BTC in donations. Would you guys be interested in that or would you rather deal with a little downtime here and there?

Can you give us more information about what causes the bottlenecks with bitcoind ? Like what volume and type of transactions? Is it all CPU? I'm sort of hoping to use bitcoinj, but in reality having instawallet running as a stable service would be ideal for what I want to do.
You should just start charging a transaction fee. I'd far rather pay that than give a donation.

[Stephen Gornick]

develops. Maybe other services/solutions will make Instwallet obsolete, maybe I'll find a way to finance it that I'm happy with or maybe it will just run on donations.

I wonder if offering a white-label version would be a revenue source.  For instance, a retail merchant might wish to run some promotion where given away are scratch-off tickets each with InstaWallet URLs or something to that effect.    For that, the merchant might want their own branded instawallet site.  And, of course, they'ld need (and be paying for) enterprise-level service (i.e., able to serve adequately the expected load).

Also, I wonder if there isn't a revenue opportunity to integrate some spend for balances in an instawallet.  For instance, exchanges are looking to add customers.  Any instawallet with 1 BTC or more is a good candidate to offer an account at an exchange (and InstaWallet gets commission for each user who signs up).

I've not used BitPay yet but I suspect once I do I'll be willing to pay a monthly fee to have an instawallet + BitPay combination.  Especially if it will be in exchange for a service level commitment.

[jav]

Can you give us more information about what causes the bottlenecks with bitcoind ? Like what volume and type of transactions? Is it all CPU? I'm sort of hoping to use bitcoinj, but in reality having instawallet running as a stable service would be ideal for what I want to do.

It's mostly the fact that I'm using the account feature of bitcoind. I didn't realize in the beginning, that the account code often calculates things from scratch (for example when calculating the balance of an account). I have already written a cache ( https://github.com/javgh/bitcoin/tree/balancecache ), but it will need some more fundamental changes to scale further.

I currently have around 30000 accounts (almost all of them empty of course, that's the nature of the site). If you don't make much use of the account feature, than you will probably not run into the same problems.

You should just start charging a transaction fee. I'd far rather pay that than give a donation.

I agree, I also don't like asking for donations. So scratch that "donate for bigger server" idea. (You are of course welcome to donate and I appreciate that very much, but I don't want to give anyone the feeling, that they are obliged to donate).

I have been considering transaction fees and will probably experiment with something in that direction. Unfortunately this is another area where the bitcoin daemon needs improvement. Using the RPC interface, it is currently very hard to control when and how much fee is included (and if I start taking transaction fees, I will want to pass some of them on to the miners). So things need to improve in this area first (or me finding the time to do it myself) before I can pursue that further.

@Gornick: Those are interesting ideas. I'm also toying with different revenue models. There are definitely a number of things to try out. But you know how it is: "so much to code, so little time". ;-)

[spruce]

What is the approximate traffic flow? How many BTC in and out average in a 24 hour period, would you say?

[jav]

I have now deleted a bunch of old accounts to ease the load on the system. Accounts with ALL of the following conditions

• balance of zero
• never received a transaction
• not been accessed in the last couple of weeks

have been deleted. I can't imagine anyone being affected by this, but if you had such an account, the associated Bitcoin address is now no longer valid and you have to revisit the site to get a new one.

If you experience any problems because of this clean up, please get in touch with me, as I have backups of all deleted accounts.

What is the approximate traffic flow? How many BTC in and out average in a 24 hour period, would you say?

I won't disclose BTC volume for now (although sooner or later someone will probably extract that from the block chain - it's not that hard with the right tools). But in terms of number of transactions, the site has about 70 per day.

As I said, it's not terrible much. The scaling issues are mostly the big number of accounts and really inefficient algorithms. There are many possible solutions to this, but all of them will take a bit of time.

[elk-tamer]

jav, Have you considered moving the account generation to page other than the landing page? I know I've created a few accounts just by clicking your sig.

[naypalm]

Hello! I was just doing a google search for "bitcoin instawallet" and here are my results per 2 different computers and 1 mobile device. Each with their own different ISP IP.

Computer 1:


Computer 2:


Mobile Phone:


I only bring this up because there is an instawallet publicly visible in a google seach for "bitcoin instawallet". I guess a post here (http://orlingrabbe.com/?p=1476084883) is what caused it to become visible. It might be wise for the creator of instawallet to delete this wallet just in case. Or if there is some sort of way to stop google from displaying instawallet pages in google searches.

Please be advised and DON'T POST YOUR INSTAWALLET URL!

[marcus_of_augustus]

Cool, how much is in it?

[jav]

jav, Have you considered moving the account generation to page other than the landing page? I know I've created a few accounts just by clicking your sig.

Yes, I will change it like that at some point.