[ANN] Instawallet will we down for a few hours - page 2.

SgtSpike

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Quote from: giszmo on April 26, 2012, 10:56:45 AM

Quote from: SgtSpike on April 26, 2012, 02:25:13 AM

I'd prefer your ToS say that as long as the site is running, the users' bitcoins are safe and will never be used. I'd also like to see that a warning will be posted at least 90 days prior to any known permanent shutdown of the site.

JMO, take it or leave it. Wink

SgtSpike, you would qualify for a good scammer I guess. I mean if I don't check that site in 90 days (they can't mail me neither), they should legally own my coins without me shouting "SCAMMER"? No way!
If bitcoin goes through the roof now, they put some notice that the service will be discontinued by blabla and start walletinsta.com instead?
I would expect to have all the funds available for 10$ processing fee for years after closing the service. You can't just take your user's money. (I mean legally you might be allowed to do so after a certain time but for me bitcoin is still very much about honesty, trust and reputation ... or anarchy if you prefer that word.)

Well, I just picked an arbitrary deadline that would be acceptable to me. But I see your point. OTOH, they can't just be forced to host the site forever in the event that they want to shut it down, so what is your counter-proposal for a reasonable ToS in the event of a site shutdown?

giszmo

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WalletScrutiny.com

Quote from: SgtSpike on April 26, 2012, 02:25:13 AM

I'd prefer your ToS say that as long as the site is running, the users' bitcoins are safe and will never be used. I'd also like to see that a warning will be posted at least 90 days prior to any known permanent shutdown of the site.

JMO, take it or leave it. Wink

SgtSpike, you would qualify for a good scammer I guess. I mean if I don't check that site in 90 days (they can't mail me neither), they should legally own my coins without me shouting "SCAMMER"? No way!
If bitcoin goes through the roof now, they put some notice that the service will be discontinued by blabla and start walletinsta.com instead?
I would expect to have all the funds available for 10$ processing fee for years after closing the service. You can't just take your user's money. (I mean legally you might be allowed to do so after a certain time but for me bitcoin is still very much about honesty, trust and reputation ... or anarchy if you prefer that word.)

davout

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1davout

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 !

SgtSpike

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I'd prefer your ToS say that as long as the site is running, the users' bitcoins are safe and will never be used. I'd also like to see that a warning will be posted at least 90 days prior to any known permanent shutdown of the site.

JMO, take it or leave it. Wink

davout

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1davout

Quote from: giszmo on April 25, 2012, 08:09:45 PM

Hmm ... interesting to know that January is old for you already. Not sure if I touched all my ~20 instawallet urls in that time.

Jan is the name of the person who used to own Instawallet

We will definitely have some stats posted later on.

giszmo

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WalletScrutiny.com

Hmm ... interesting to know that January is old for you already. Not sure if I touched all my ~20 instawallet urls in that time.

I love how instant instawallet is but also wonder how many of your urls actually hold coins. My guess would be less than 2%.

I would be very interested in figures on how many transactions you process per day from how many users, how is the distribution of coins per url (0, <.1, <.5, <2, <10, <50, <200, <1000, >=1000) or the median of all urls with coins or some other metric that gives us an idea of how people use instawallet.

Are many users actually using instawallet for more than to give a coin to a non-bitcoiner (my main use case)?

davout

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1davout

Quote from: giszmo on April 25, 2012, 04:00:36 PM

buying time while running with our money, huh?

can't hear you i'm running!

Quote from: giszmo on April 25, 2012, 04:00:36 PM

Serious question: What will you do with all the dead accounts? How many BTC are lingering around without the url having had a hit in more than 6 months? I couldn't find anything like TOS on that when I last checked but would put some expiration date even if it was 5 years. Or do you rely on any implicit regulations that would make my accounts unavailable after a certain time?

There are no implicit regulations, but that's a really good point, I should write some ToS and mention that because there are a couple of accounts that haven't been accessed for a while. Some accounts haven't been visited since Jan implemented such tracking, but I'm unsure of *when* the tracking was actually implemented.

The migration is now complete, and as soon as the new DNS records propagate Instawallet should be back up. It should also be much faster, and handle concurrent connections much more reliably. I'll elaborate on all that, and provide some statistics after I get some sleep Cheesy

As always, users are more than welcome to report any issues they might encounter at david {at} bitcoin-central.net.

To all bitcoiners : thank you having been so patient !

giszmo

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WalletScrutiny.com

buying time while running with our money, huh?

Wink

just kidding

Serious question: What will you do with all the dead accounts? How many BTC are lingering around without the url having had a hit in more than 6 months? I couldn't find anything like TOS on that when I last checked but would put some expiration date even if it was 5 years. Or do you rely on any implicit regulations that would make my accounts unavailable after a certain time?

davout

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1davout

Hello all !

Instawallet will be down for a few hours for maintenance operations.
It will come back much more responsive and fast than in its current version.

Thank you all for your patience !

Topic: [ANN] Instawallet will we down for a few hours - page 2. (Read 2554 times)