Topic: [ANNOUNCE] Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin Client - page 61. (Read 274537 times)

You understand correctly.  A favored address can both be an input and an output in a transaction, however there are other downsides to doing things this way than just making it obvious which output is the change.  They are obscure enough to ignore for the average Joe and it's uncertain that they actually present a risk, so for the vast majority of users it's unlikely to be an issue, but it's a poor habit to get started.

Hi,

on user friendliness:

I think there should be a "help" button.
It is not clear to me what "prioritized" or "frozen" addresses are. Of course reading this forum's thread would probably answer my question after a finite (yet potentially considerable) amount of time.

Same applies to the concept of "change" addresses. Those familar with how Bitcoin works may know that it is. For the other users, some carefully chosen words of explanation would make the big difference in user experience. Note that, if I understand correctly, the concept of a separate set of change addresses is not a necessity of the bitcoin protocol as such. It is just an implementation variant (also chosen by the satoshi client if I understand correctly) to make tracking of bitcoin flows a little bit more difficult to track. But in principle I could use any address in my wallet, possibly also the paying address itself (?), as change address for a payment.

Generally, if Electrum shall be used by more people, and not only by [nerds/experts/enthusiast with free time/however-you-call-them], a simple textual explanation is simple yet very effective. I am seeing so often that SW developers make great SW but miss to spend a small amount of time in documenting/describing functions that are non-evident for the user. This is a pity and a waste of resources, because a feature only makes sense if it can be reasonably used by the majority of people (=users, not nerds). There are also examples of well documented software, e.g. total commander (for some reason this comes up to my mind now...), which contains a lot of non-evident functions but good descriptions, so that every user knows what these functions are all about.

With such "help" text in the client, this would mean that those who find Electrum via the wiki or via google and directly install it on their PC do not need to find this forum, then find this tread, and then read this thread (>30 pages) until getting an answer to what certain functions mean. Nobody can really expect from every user to spend a whole lot of time for this. And if one does expect this from the users, one has to except that only very few experts are going to use this software.

Finally, some textual explanations in the client will also save this forum from unnecessary questions.

All this will become even more valid as more and more features are going to be added to the software.

thanks.
you can already do this with the command line with -c, but I agree that it wuold be nice to add to the gui

Fixed. I like these new features.. one more to think about, could a receiving address be specified as a change address? I'd like to always spend money from a vanity address without having to constantly refund it after every spend. It seems like a neat way to let people know I'm the one tipping them (if they recognize they vanity).

(BTW, some bitcoins on their way to your server address)

What kind of bad things might happen if I were to run this?


If nothing, would it be prudent to keep two versions listed like:

sudo pip-python install http://ecdsa.org/electrum/Electrum-latest.tar.gz

sudo pip-python install http://ecdsa.org/electrum/Electrum-stable.tar.gz

... just so we can easily revert when helping to test and stuff goes south?

sorry about that. I did not take enough time to test things..

edit: here is another bugfix, version 0.54c

Import worked perfect with a different format.

Now I'm noticing that the calculated fee is not populating the fee box even though there is a .001 per input specified in the client settings.

I priorities my new vanity key, manually entered in a fee, hit send, and now I'm getting 'global name 'prioritized_addresses' is not defined'.

indeed, that's probably a compressed key format.

I found the problem
you probably used the new compressed private key format.
the client did not import it because these keys are not yet supported.

I released 0.54b. it displays an error message instead of making you believe that it imported the key.

grep not finding it.

One thing I did notice is that beginning of the private key didn't start with a 5 which I'm kinda use to seeing. I left a little bit of the private key in the example above. Dunno if that has anything to do with the problem.

not now

thanks.

can you check if the imported address is in your wallet file?

Is there a "freeze" and a "prioritize" command (for the console)?
Is it possible to prioritize a change address?

2 BTC on the way ... 

Not at all.

it is frozen

I feel very happy about this new features 

What I dont catch yet is the use and interaction of frozen and prioritized addresses. E.g. what happens if an addr. is simultaneously frozen and prioritized?
A short tutorial about this features would be helpful.

does it show up in text mode?
edit: this makes me think that imported addresses should have a coor too

coins received at a frozen addresses will not be used in your transactions.

yes you did ask already.

Trying .54...

I imported a vanity key and it does not show up in the receive list. I'd like to set this as a priority address but can't since it's not there.

What exactly does a frozen address do (or not do)?

Also, I can't remember if I asked for this or not, but would it be possible to sort the lists by clicking on column headers?

I just released a new version: 0.54

This version introduces several new features in the Qt GUI, that give the user more control on their wallet.
However, these features make the user interface a bit more complicated; I believe I will make them optional in the future, in order to hide this complexity.

List of new features:
* The list of 'change' addresses is visible in a 'change' tab (no interactivity for now)
* The 'receive' tab now has a 'new' button, that allows the user to create addresses beyond the wallet's gap limit. The user gets a warning, and addresses that are beyond the gap limit are displayed in red. The red color will remain until the gap has been filled. (in other words, to fill the gap you need to send coins to the last non-red address of your list).
* Frozen addresses are displayed with a blue background.
* Addresses have a 'priority' flag. Prioritized addresses will be used first when creating a transaction. Prioritized addresses are displayed with a green background.

I know that colored backgrounds are not satisfactory for color blind people; I guess I will add icons in the future.

I am aware of the issue; there are two problems:
 - a module was mising in setup.py this is fixed in git  (see recent commits)
 - verifymessage fails with compressed keys (the new format used by the satoshi client). the result is that it will return False on a string signed by the satoshi client using a recent wallet. this was reported by nanotube. it is not fixed yet.