Android wallet balance viewer - page 3.

willphase

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Quote from: SgtSpike on June 27, 2011, 05:43:16 PM

I suppose I would be nervous giving an application access to my wallet file...

this is why it only exports the public keys - and the tool to export the keys is separate from the android application. You can run the export tool on a machine with no internet if you worry about it sending keys or data anywhere - or just view the source here or compile it yourself. Once you have the addresses then you can view your balance (and it will update automatically) from your android phone, with no risk of anyone stealing them and making payments (because you need the private keys, which you can leave secure in your wallet.dat on a usb stick). I could even argue it's actually more secure using this tool to view your balance, because there's no way anyone could steal your bitcoins from just your public addresses...

Quote from: SgtSpike on June 27, 2011, 05:43:16 PM

I'd also need an android-based phone to use this. Tongue

Yes, although I'm hoping to get my hands on an iPhone soon then I'll port it to that - the code to actually parse the transactions from blockexplorer should port pretty easily to Objective C.

Will

SgtSpike

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I suppose I would be nervous giving an application access to my wallet file...

I'd also need an android-based phone to use this. Tongue

willphase

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UPDATES

v1.0.5 of wallet

* Change default so it loads transactions of 50 keys at a time from blockexplorer (rather than 10). This should speed up the balance checking.
* Fix some issues of loading corrupt history

v1.0.1 of decoder

* Now extracts ALL public keys and not just some of them. I was trying to be too smart before and only picking some to export (to make the downloads for the wallet smaller) but you do need to export them all since you don't know which ones have been used for change transactions.

Let me know if you find the tool useful. I'm using it as my main wallet now and store my wallet.dat on encrypted media unless I need to make a payment - it functions pretty well as a simple read-only balance checker to make sure my pool is paying me reliably.

Will

willphase

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released v1.0.4 - this fixes some null pointer issues and also makes the progress bar more reliable in low bandwidth scenarios (e.g. when on GPRS)

Let me know if you have any issues e.g. giving wrong balance. The problem is likely with the way the addresses are exported from the wallet.dat - really need the key export feature to be added to bitcoin!

Also added a FAQ page to answer any questions.

Will

willphase

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Quote from: giszmo on June 24, 2011, 10:17:21 AM

I don't see your app particularly useful but I'm interested in the reactions of others as I also thought about doing an app that would require the keys. Actually mine would need some private keys but not necessarily with a balance on them. Guess the crucial part is that the key extraction is open source.

In your case if the extraction is open source and if users compile it from that source, things can be pretty save but expecting many will take the hassle to compile for them self is illusionary.

anyway, i'll stay tuned Wink

Well I personally have found it pretty useful - I can login from my pool/exchange on my phone and withdraw bitcoins, then wait a few minutes and check my wallet balance, all from my android phone...

yes the key extraction was a pain, once the official bitcoin client support key export then it'll all become a lot easier. I debated which language to write the extraction utility in, and whether to have lots of dependencies on other libraries (e.g. berkeley database)- but in the end made the decision to make the decoder pretty much standalone so it could compile on as many systems as possible without needing to download tons of libraries and get them installed.

I have code to extract private keys too, and I've imported them into a fully blown bitcoin wallet (like bitcoinj) pretty easily, but until the reference bitcoin implementation supports this as standard, anything like this will remain a pain. I also didn't want to put bitcoinj in an android app since it's still quite heavyweight at the moment.

Thanks for the interest.

Will

giszmo

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WalletScrutiny.com

I don't see your app particularly useful but I'm interested in the reactions of others as I also thought about doing an app that would require the keys. Actually mine would need some private keys but not necessarily with a balance on them. Guess the crucial part is that the key extraction is open source.

In your case if the extraction is open source and if users compile it from that source, things can be pretty save but expecting many will take the hassle to compile for them self is illusionary.

anyway, i'll stay tuned Wink

willphase

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Activity: 767

Merit: 500

Hi,

I've written an android application that allows you to view your wallet balance on your android phone, without having to have a complete wallet stored on it.

It works by exporting your public keys from your bitcoin wallet using a command line tool. You then place your public addresses in a repository, or on the SD card, then run the application on your android phone - import your public keys, and then goes to blockexplorer and adds up all the transactions to/from those addresses and presents you the result. No need to wait ages to download blocks, get your wallet balance on any Android phone in seconds!

All the source is provided so you can check I'm not doing anything bad. I also provide Windows/Linux binaries of the decoder tool.

The source and binaries are:

http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinwallet/

Let me know if you find it useful, or any issues you have - I haven't tested it with large wallets so I'd be interested to hear if people have issues with that. Please read the FAQ for answers to most questions.

Backup your wallet before using this tool. I do not accept any liability for wallet corruption caused by this app!!!

Cheers,

Will

Topic: Android wallet balance viewer - page 3. (Read 8171 times)