Topic: [2019-10-20] HTC Launches Exodus 1S, First Phone That Can Run a Full BTC Node (Read 245 times)

I think whoever would decide to have a full node on a mobile phone would probably be using it only when connected to wifi. Really unlimited and affordable plans allowing for hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth per month aren't very common.

I am surprised that there are so many positive events for bitcoin but it does not affect the price. This is good evidence that the market is speculative.

Not cheap at all. 0.15 BTC is almost 1,200 USD and when you compare it's very, very sub-par hardware to other flagships from Oneplus, Samsung, Apple, Pixel, it doesn't look very competitive.

The Exodus is running these specs, while an S10 (which is around the same price-point) is running these in comparison...



Don't see anyone using this at all... Even the people that are really interested in crypto-currencies would likely settle with another flagship and use a laptop/desktop to do their crypto activities.

I have always found these claims of ultra secure chips with special storage that neither the manufacturer or any malicious software can gain access to, to be just a marketing feature to keep people quiet.

Chances are that the manufacturer of the chip has left a backdoor for the government to enter, which is why I will not ever touch Huawei phones as there is a higher risk of this to actually be the case. Better safe than sorry.

Thank you for your post Carlton, I do appreciate the time it took you to give me and other readers an insight as to how things work under the hood. I'm out of merit so I can only show my appreciation this way.

@cr1776. If someone's son or daughter is a bitcoiner and also owns this phone, it might be advisable for the parent to check their child's cellular data activity and usage everyday hehehe.

Dataplans in most countries will eventually become less of a problem because more and more telecommunication companies start to offer unlimited data plans. I'm currently on an unlimited data plan, which I pay quite a lot for comparatively, but it allows you to get a lot of things done without thinking about running out of megs.

I remember when I started out with a 50MB UMTS data plan years ago. It was €60 a month. I'm currently paying €50 for an unlimited data plan. Everything gets better and more affordable as time goes by.

The introduction of 5G will help help a lot too mainly because of the much lower latency, and the much lower power consumption, which is quite an important factor when running a full node on a smartphone.

I agree right now it isn't really useful or practical, but IF (and that is a big if, admittedly) they continue to update it in 5 or 10 years, it might be practical and they will have experience dealing with it. 

As far as the data plan, maybe it is smart enough to avoid the full node being active while on cellular and only activate it while on wifi?  I don't know, and agree it isn't practical, but it is nice to see people pushing things out that may not be useful now, but will be later.

This is something big blockers with their limitless block size roadmap wouldn't able to do would there be enough demand for the space in their blocks.

Ethereum's blockchain size is rapidly approaching 2TB which means that they already can't have a full node running on a mobile phone.

These nodes will end up running only in big data centers if they survive long enough, easy to combat by governments through legislation.

because the channel map isn't too big today, it can basically already be done, only the software isn't quite there yet...

Neutrino wallet does what you say, but it's not finished, and the new-ish protocol it uses (Golomb-Rice filtering) for querying the blockchain efficiently isn't in the main Bitcoin implementation yet (but going in the right direction, version 0.19.0 is being tested right now, and includes the BIP158 half of the protocol, which sometimes is literally referred to as "Neutrino"). You can use it now, but only btcd nodes support it, and there are about 10 or less btcd nodes, so it's not something you can necessarily rely on. And again, the wallet part isn't finished anyway

But in future, the channel map could become enormous, assuming Lightning takes off. And phones won't be able to deal with that, it could grow far faster than improvements in phone specs could possibly keep up. The Lightning devs are designing various new ways to make sure phones can handle only what they need from the channel map (sort of a local-view-only mode), and yet could still do routing (and get paid fees for doing so ). It's all a little in flux though, it wouldn't surprise me if a developer suddenly announces a change in the approach today, tomorrow or next month; they're still seem very much in exploration mode, as the potential permutations using the Bitcoin scripting that makes this all possible are wide and varied (and consider also that proposed new Bitcoin scripting operations are part of the planning going into it).


these stop-gaps and compromises will be fine in the short term, they amount to the same thing as a phone-based Lightning node in practice (and that's the path I'm gonna follow, don't like the idea of a lightweight Lightning wallet using commercial Watchtowers)



Typical phones (Android & iOS) are in many ways more solid security-wise than your average desktop PC, but that's not necessarily good enough.

A fundamental problem is the routing issue; if you want to route other peoples' Lightning payments on your phone, you need to let the software use a hot wallet to do so, there's simply no getting around that, as the software has got to be able to sign transactions as fast as it receives routing requests, and that's too fast for the user to check each and every one and authorize it with their Trezor

The people at ARM might tell us their latest mobile CPU has some special new tech that can keep cryptographic keys in a special part of memory that definitely cannot be accessed by rogue software. But if the OS can access that special region in memory, then all an attacker needs is to find a hole in the OS (or the wallet software) that lets them access the keys too. There is no definitive solution, only cat & mouse good enough-for-now stuff is possible. Something with better guarantees might one day be devised, but the way the problem looks now it seems intractable. I'm optimistic though

It's quite fascinating how fast technology can progress, because initially it indeed looked quite unrealistic to see a phone run a full node, but the exponential growth of technology keeps shutting people up every single time.

I wonder what the next step is.... how realistic is it that we can see full LN nodes run on a phone within 2 years? It's one thing to run a regular node, but the dynamics of LN I imagine require additional security features and tweaks.

Finally a cheap phone that is fully capable of promoting crypto transactions to the masses. At first I thought that this Exodus 1S would be a more premium version of the Exodus 1 but it turns out to be considerably cheaper (400$ to be exact). When Samsung did it to their flagship phone, Galaxy S10, I thought that the trend for integrated crypto wallets in phones would only be for the top of the line models for mobile phone brands which is totally a dumb idea if they are really thinking about including or at least covering all of the social classes not only the ones in the middle class and above. With a 233$ phone at least HTC is giving also giving a chance for freelancers and small businesses to have an option of accepting cryptos as their payment.

prune mode. minimum space needed is something like 3-4GB. But yeah, strictly speaking not a full node

It's easy to forget how much bandwidth full node Bitcoin needs too, which is a bad fit for mobile, depending on what your data plan is like. although blocksonly mode can easily keep daily consumption below 200MB, for now at least

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can't help myself but say: people laughed when this was suggested (full node on a phone) a few years ago. But as predicted, the barriers keep falling as phones improve and the Bitcoin software gets more efficient (and adds more modes to handle low resources ).

There's actually an open proposal to add the code for an Android wallet gui to Bitcoin: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/16883

HTC mobile company is pretty much considered to be dead for me.They have been out in the market for a while when it comes to mobile competition and
now they are trying to comeback together with the hype of cryptocurrency and this one is really that different to those few who already integrated blockchain tech
to their mobile company but take a look on what happened? It didnt make any effects or it doesnt even boost out their sales.For this one, this is truly non-practical but i agree
as said above that this is somewhat a good option to have.

Yeah, it's not practical at all, don't think it would be attractive for most bitcoin users.
HTC aiming a specific market, for people who want to have bitcoin full node because it is the only way to use Bitcoin in a fully private way and full nodes are critical to securing the future of Bitcoin.
However, It’s common for full nodes on high-speed connections to use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month.
Download usage is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional 195 gigabytes the first time starts the node.

Source

Full node? So the owner will use the expensive storage of a phone and the even more expensive data plan?
Who on earth would use that?!

Yes, it's an interesting advertising, now everybody talks about it. But useful / practical? Nah.

It could be expanded with 512GB microSDs.

I don't think it's practical at all, but more choices is always better, I suppose. I'm sure there will be a few people out there who will want to use this functionality lol. We could certainly use even just a handful more full nodes.

This is a good development of hardware, however. A kind of development that we in the Aeon community have been waiting for.

Hmmm following the link in the 1st post:

https://www.htcexodus.com/us/cryptophone/exodus1s/

On the spec page you see this:


So, how do you get the full blockchain in 64 GB....

-Dave

There is absolutely no reason to own a phone like this, not to mention that the probability of updates to this smartphone is fairly low. On top of that, Android isn't necessarily a "safe" platform to hold a bitcoin wallet. And even on top of that, you dropped your device and it broke? Oops. Did you lose your phone? Tough luck. Even the specs of the phone aren't worth a second look, to be honest. If someone wants to hold a safe wallet, just buy a Ledger or something. If you want to host a node, get a server instead.

I rather wait for full node clients to become less taxing on the specifications of my device than to go by what a corporation wants me to use.

I don't want to follow HTC's "truth" of the network state which can change at any time, but go with what thousands of unbiased nodes confirm as truth, which I have been doing for nearly two years now with my full nodes. I'm pretty certain that every person running a node thinks that way. HTC creates a potential attack surface if the owners of the devices don't have the freedom to make any changes.