I'm sorry that you feel that volunteers my not be doing enough to serve your personal interests, have you considered working on whatever you believe needs to be done yourself?

Awesome, we have a volunteer to create the ultimate Bitcoin user experience!

So, how are you going to attack the issue?

You should probably go through all the most popular wallet options, list their bad points, good points, then lay out how you would make the perfect wallet.

If you make a comprehensive analysis of what needs to be done, and developers see eye to eye with you, then I'm sure someone will volunteer hundreds of hours of their free time to build it for you. (no joke)

But if you sit there and say "oh well, no, I mean... just like, make it better, ok?" or "I think the wallet should have unicorns and microwave popcorn for the user!" then no one will take you seriously.

I think I gave you the most useful piece of advice: If you think something ought to be done, you should consider picking up a shovel and doing it. Or paying someone to do it. It sounded like you were griping that other people weren't going and doing it for you... which is not a helpful perspective.  Especially with comments as vague as yours, I couldn't even respond "Item X is being worked on over there, and item Y was tried but failed, item Z is believed to be precluded by physical reality, and item Q was what we used to do but took it out because consideration R."...

To whatever extent any developer is doing something because you think it ought to be done or suggested it, they're doing it as a volunteer, unless you start cutting them checks.

People have very odd notions about the financial implications of software development in this space. It's interesting and important work, but it's also very challenging. Anyone with (or who develops) the skills and background to participate extensively can be paid very well by stable non-bitcoin industry jobs. Sure, Bitcoins themselves may or may not increase in value, but you can acquire Bitcoins and contribute nothing to the technology and still benefit from that, and many do. Considering the difficulty and risk specific to Bitcoin, I doubt anyone works on it instead of all the other well paying technical work they could do, except out of a deep passion for the technology and what it enables in the world.

My own view is that adoption has already outpaced the maturity of the ecosystem. While I don't begrudge other people going for more adoption, I prefer to see more organic growth and less forced effort trying to get people using things that may not be ready for them or which they may not be ready for in turn.

Initially I was using Armory and just lately I've switched over to using electrum. If by definition, what you are saying security and user experience becomes the major road blocks to BTC and any crypto adoption, then you should really try out the software. How simple could it get?

The guy gets shot down because 2FA isn't a suitable solution. It's meant to protect a client/server relationship. If the client is compromised, the 2FA prevents the attacker from logging to the server. If the server is compromised, 2FA doesn't help. With a wallet that you keep on your machine, you are the server.

Personally, I'm looking forward to having a solution as easy as the subway cards. RFID and no touch scanner. The display is on the payment device. Your card signs anything that comes from a set of known payees and up to given amount. Or alternatively, you create an escrow account and they give you a passive card. It can't sign but they will record your usage and they will automatically pay for you.

Exactly! "2FA" like Yubikey or Google Authenticator or SMS passcode couldn't be decentralized and integrated into the bitcoin infrastructure BECAUSE bitcoin is transparent.

You don't really understand what you are proposing, unless you are talking about something else like multi-sig transaction.

Is it really their responsibility to do so?

grendel25,

To put it in a less technical way, any 2FA-style device has to provide a way to prove to someone else that it is in the operator's control. This is done by the 2FA device providing a code.

For Google Auth, YubiKey, and the like, both the device and the someone else (a centralized online service provider) have a common "shared secret", and this secret can be used to generate short codes that are just a few digits long. The shared secret can't be stored in the blockchain because then anyone could generate the codes.

Hardware wallets (and Bitcoin in general) use public-key cryptography and can use a publicly-viewable blockchain to prove that the codes they generate (called signatures) are valid. Unfortunately, the codes that they generate as proof are 155 digits long (or 88 if encoded in Base58), so it wouldn't be very practical to ask a user to type these codes in. That's (one reason) why they transfer these codes via USB.

The point is that you can't have the advantages of both: you can't have a 2FA device which uses public-key cryptography and would be publicly verifiable via the blockchain which also provides short codes. This means we're stuck with either centralization, or hardware wallets which need a digitial connection (USB today, possibly Bluetooth or audio in the future?).

Incidentally, Electrum 2.x does plan on implementing both styles of 2FA, with Trezor and HW.1 on the hardware wallet side, and with TrustedCoin on the centralized short-code side.

With the Ledger Wallet, we are trying to achieve "Apple like" user experience, in conjonction with high levels of security thanks to hardware securing your private keys.

It starts with a well designed white box, at a reasonable price point (29 EUR + taxes).

To see more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFvHq8zEgd8

Don't sell the blockchain short on it's capabilities and what the technology can evolve into despite what it looks like today. 

Look, I'm technical minded but my expertise is not in bitcoin.  I'm a network engineer.  I recently closed out a VoIP cluster project that connected two countries at five different operating locations scattered across North America and the ENTIRE time my colleagues said it couldn't be done.  I even doubted it based on very specific vendor imposed limitations.  But me and another guy kept plugging away and just the other day we got it working.

But you do go on to say Electrum is looking at 2FA.  Great.  That's great news.  Really looking forward to how that develops.  Thanks for posting that.