[ANN] Instawallet is back, alive and well!

tvbcof

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Quote from: davout on May 01, 2012, 10:06:29 AM

Quote from: Trader Steve on May 01, 2012, 09:18:47 AM

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?

Both are deluxe

Paytunia is a more integrated approach, it integrates seamlessly with Bitcoin-Central.net, it gives you full account history and a bunch of additional features. It is mostly intended for long to medium term storage of funds, and mobile usage through the Android and iPhone app.

Instawallet is focused on "just working", you visit it, *boom* you have a wallet, you can access it on the go with FriendlyPay (released on the AppStore, and soon on Google Play). It gives instant gratification, you send funds to it, it's updated immediately with a comforting cash-register sound. It's targeted to newcomers, and paranoid advanced users (it's very lightweight, making it perfectly suitable for Tor access).

The big plan is to integrate these tools (and others to come) very tightly in order to provide a seamless experience for anyone who want to do business with Bitcoins or keep them as investment. There's gonna be more on all this soon

...or maybe the interest in obtaining Instawallet was as a way to fund someone's retirement?

apetersson

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seems the only viable option is to use html5 like easywallet.

it seems to me the vendetta is actually limited to bitcoin only. square, paypal don't appear to have these problems.

Boussac

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e-ducat.fr

Too late ! Friendlypay was pulled from the appstore today by Apple's bitcoin-cleaning patrol..

You can still find instawallet for android in Google Play !

davout

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1davout

Quote from: giszmo on May 27, 2012, 02:41:16 AM

May I ask you to put at least the information that can be found in this thread also on instawallet.org? I would find it appropriate to see more than just an email address that doesn't even specify if it's the admin, the owner or his uncle's friend. "An original idea by Jan Vornberger" pretty clearly indicates that Jan is not taking any responsibility, so who does?

I'm not sure about how the footer looked like when you posted your message, but now it says "Paymium".

Also if you use Instawallet on a regular basis and have an iPhone you'll want to download our iOS app

giszmo

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WalletScrutiny.com

May I ask you to put at least the information that can be found in this thread also on instawallet.org? I would find it appropriate to see more than just an email address that doesn't even specify if it's the admin, the owner or his uncle's friend. "An original idea by Jan Vornberger" pretty clearly indicates that Jan is not taking any responsibility, so who does?

Trader Steve

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"How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time..."

Quote from: davout on May 01, 2012, 10:06:29 AM

Quote from: Trader Steve on May 01, 2012, 08:57:14 AM

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.

We're working on alternate designs for Instawallet, dual-currency display will be part of it.

Quote from: Trader Steve on May 01, 2012, 09:18:47 AM

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?

Both are deluxe

Paytunia is a more integrated approach, it integrates seamlessly with Bitcoin-Central.net, it gives you full account history and a bunch of additional features. It is mostly intended for long to medium term storage of funds, and mobile usage through the Android and iPhone app.

Instawallet is focused on "just working", you visit it, *boom* you have a wallet, you can access it on the go with FriendlyPay (released on the AppStore, and soon on Google Play). It gives instant gratification, you send funds to it, it's updated immediately with a comforting cash-register sound. It's targeted to newcomers, and paranoid advanced users (it's very lightweight, making it perfectly suitable for Tor access).

The big plan is to integrate these tools (and others to come) very tightly in order to provide a seamless experience for anyone who want to do business with Bitcoins or keep them as investment. There's gonna be more on all this soon

Excellent!

davout

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Quote from: Trader Steve on May 01, 2012, 08:57:14 AM

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.

We're working on alternate designs for Instawallet, dual-currency display will be part of it.

Quote from: Trader Steve on May 01, 2012, 09:18:47 AM

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?

Both are deluxe

Paytunia is a more integrated approach, it integrates seamlessly with Bitcoin-Central.net, it gives you full account history and a bunch of additional features. It is mostly intended for long to medium term storage of funds, and mobile usage through the Android and iPhone app.

Instawallet is focused on "just working", you visit it, *boom* you have a wallet, you can access it on the go with FriendlyPay (released on the AppStore, and soon on Google Play). It gives instant gratification, you send funds to it, it's updated immediately with a comforting cash-register sound. It's targeted to newcomers, and paranoid advanced users (it's very lightweight, making it perfectly suitable for Tor access).

The big plan is to integrate these tools (and others to come) very tightly in order to provide a seamless experience for anyone who want to do business with Bitcoins or keep them as investment. There's gonna be more on all this soon

Trader Steve

hero member

Activity: 836

Merit: 1007

"How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time..."

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?

Trader Steve

hero member

Activity: 836

Merit: 1007

"How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time..."

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.

davout

legendary

Activity: 1372

Merit: 1007

1davout

Quote from: Stephen Gornick on April 30, 2012, 03:52:35 AM

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

Stephen Gornick

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Quote from: davout on April 30, 2012, 03:22:27 AM

Quote from: Stephen Gornick on April 30, 2012, 02:00:14 AM

Quote from: davout on April 26, 2012, 09:54:25 AM

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

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1davout

Quote from: Stephen Gornick on April 30, 2012, 02:00:14 AM

Quote from: davout on April 26, 2012, 09:54:25 AM

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

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Quote from: davout on April 26, 2012, 09:54:25 AM

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

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1davout

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 !

Boussac

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e-ducat.fr

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

apetersson

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FYI: main domain seems to be working right now.

davout

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1davout

Quote from: apetersson on April 23, 2012, 08:18:56 AM

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 Cheesy