Topic: Armory Crowdfunding Finished! [UPDATE - *BETA*] - page 7. (Read 25531 times)

i thought the seminar was excellent altho the math was over my head.  it also clarified several principles of cryptography and quantum computing that i had been confused about.

you have a very clear way of writing and expressing your thoughts which i admire and its coming thru in your implementation of Armory.  i've been experimenting with some of the other wallets compared to yours and its becoming clear to me that this offline wallet feature is truly the ONLY way to 99.99999% secure your wallet (% for illustrative purposes only!).  eto please provide the actual probability of inserting malware into the usb key!

the alternative wallets either are not encrypted or offer a server based solution which quite frankly i'm not comfortable with.  i'm sure the Blockchain.info and Electrum guys are totally honest but what if they get kidnapped or knocked over the head a few times and forced to corrupt their servers?  MultiBit looks good too but even with its USB stick solution one still has to bring their keys into RAM at the point of signing tx's which exposes them to malware in waiting.

this was helpful for me and was written by piuk himself concerning server based solutions:  http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2240/what-are-the-risks-of-using-strongcoin-com-as-an-online-wallet

the various splitting of keys solution also bothers me but i won't get too much into that since i probably don't understand it well.

perhaps i am being unfair to the other wallet services and suffer from a lack of knowledge.  i'm sure their services will satisfy a majority of people. however, personally, i prefer to be in total control with my keys locked away in my safe with no one to blame but myself if i lose some coins. 

the other thing thats very important here is that when one chooses a product one also chooses the person/people behind it.  i have followed eto's writings ever since he's joined the Forums and his knowledge is astounding.  its helpful to watch the discussions between him and other developers and you will get a sense of where he stands.  another very telling sign is when another developer (Jim618) from a competing wallet (Multibit) campaigns for eto to get crowdfunding; that says alot.  the fact that Armory's beta version is already functional and operational w/o any bugs that i can identify is impressive as well.

these 2 posts by eto were instrumental to me in investing further into Bitcoin last year even tho many of the concepts were over my head:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.565787 and https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/on-the-wire-byte-map-opchecksig-diagram-knowledge-donation-29416

tl;dr

short version: eto's one bad boy!

Thanks to Cypherdoc for making an extremely generous donation.  There's another hero in the house!   I am now at 20% of my goal, and three weeks to go!  Thanks so much to everyone who has supported me so far!  I am becoming very optimistic that I can actually make the goal and become an official part-time Bitcoin[-related] developer!

Anyone else have comments about the encryption seminar?

What's your math background like?  I'm curious how much non-math-y people will get out of the presentation.  Since I am a mathematician, it's difficult for me to judge

I Like the Presentation!  It `s quite useful ..I learned somethign thx !

Update:  I'm distributing the encryption seminar, finally!   It is titled:  Understanding Encryption:  Using Boring Math for Something Useful
The presentation has a good mix of math and concepts, so there should be something for everyone.  If you don't know any math, feel free to skip the math slides and just try to absorb the concepts.  I think everyone can get something out of it!

I have already sent it to everyone who donated >=$10 already and whose email address I have.  If you have donated but have not received the seminar, please email me at [email protected] and I will attach it to a reply email.  The seminar is available for both MS Office (*.ppt) and OpenOffice/ODF (*.odp).  

If you received a copy, please don't forward it to anyone else -- this is a reward for donating!  In fact, if you want to make your previous donation more effective, tell your friends about how great the seminar is, and send them to my donation page if they want to acquire a copy, too  Thanks for your support, and I hope you learn something from it!




I think it's been pretty successful so far!  I'm at 1/6 of the funding at about 1/4 the funding time.  I'll need a bit of a push to meet my goal, but it's tough to say that it hasn't been successful alread.  I think it's already more money raised than some people would've expected, and I still have 3 weeks left!  I'll be releasing some new features soon, hopefully to generate more interest.  Stay posted!

I'm only motivated by money if it's enough to cut down my hours or pay off a significant portion of my house.  So, I decided to see if I could pull off the first one with crowdfunding in exchange for keeping my software awesome and open source.  I'll let you know how it goes


[/quote]

So....................... How is it going?

Unfortunately, I'm new to Qt, so my UI code is probably "suboptimal".  On the other hand, this is mostly Python, so it should be uniformly more pleasant to deal with   I'm hoping to kind of lock-down the C++ stuff, and then users can fork and modify the code-base strictly with python (and PyQt is delightful!)



I'm only motivated by money if it's enough to cut down my hours or pay off a significant portion of my house.  So, I decided to see if I could pull off the first one with crowdfunding in exchange for keeping my software awesome and open source.  I'll let you know how it goes

Well, to be honest I created bitcoin-qt in the hope (beyond adding new features) that it would accelerate bitcoin UI development by making it more accessible. The code is set up to be readable and maintainable[1].

It has partially succeeded. There are more UI pull requests than ever before with the Wx UI. Still, things are going pretty slow. Maybe we should set up a crowdfunding too. Though I really prefer code, not cash... (unless it's enough to make it my day job then I could spend a lot of time on it)

[1] Sure, major functionality changes also require changes to Satoshi's code, which is as impenetrable as ever, though it is slowly being cleaned up and reorganized.

John,

I'd be thrilled if I was responsible for encouraging some new features in the Satoshi client!  Of course, I'd like to take credit for having done it first (like crowdfunding based on those features before anyone else has them ), but I really think the Satoshi client needs some goodies beyond security upgrades.  Security is great and all, but the Satoshi client is both the security and the face of Bitcoin, and I think the face is starting to look kind of boring...


sirk390,

You are awesome!  Thanks so much!  Please email or PM me your email address and/or mailing address, if you'd like your rewards.  I insist that everyone who deserves a USB key and/or Tshirt should get one... the bulk discounts I get for 50+ and 100+ are pretty substantial


On that note:  I haven't gotten the shirts made yet.  I was planning on doing something very simple like

(btw, that's not me... I'm much paler than that )

My girlfriend says I should include the full logo on there, but I have a few arguments against it.  I'm looking for feedback about it:
(1) I am really happy with my logo/icon, and I think it looks great without needing to identify the brand behind it.
(2) I think that identifying the brand is largely unnecessary:  the Bitcoin community is small enough that if someone else is not part of the community, they won't care what brand is behind it (in fact, advertising a brand explicitly may be undesirable for some of us geeks).   If they are part of the community, they will probably recognize it and it won't matter whether the "ARMORY" is there. 

For instance, I own one of these XKCD shirts.  I get all sorts of positive reactions to it regardless of whether the person knows what XKCD is.  But, I know my logo isn't as cool as a velociraptor (I mean, what is cooler than a velociraptor?).  Recommendations are accepted.

I just sent 50BTC. I see them as a great investment in the future of bitcoin.
You have some really excellent features likes "Deterministic wallets " and "Read-only wallets".
Keep up with the good work.

Nice job, looks great!

I hope you don't mind if we borrow some good ideas for the satoshi client

Looks like a bit of an influx of BTC donations today, so that's nice.   It was at 15BTC this morning, now it's at 50.

EDIT:  Actually, it's more likely that blockexplorer is crapping out again and it just wasn't refreshing properly earlier

Sent you 5BTC.
Keep up the good work

Hi etotheipi,

Send you a small donation to your BTC address.  It's not much, but it's also not nothing  (it was all I had in my bitcoinspinner wallet on my phone, I'll send a "proper" donation when I get back to my main PC)

Looking forward to a compiled version for windows to get around the 64/32bit python issues

10 BTC sent your way.

No rewards, thanks. I'd rather see all of it go to the actual goal.

Just tweeted the same thing from the bitcoin horn.

And added Armory donation thread to my sig.

Jim,

If you didn't just donate 5 BTC to me, I'd be donating 5 BTC to you!  I hope you accept my raw appreciation instead of a returned donation
Thanks!

I have a MultiBit twitter feed (MultiBitOrg) for release announcements:
Just tweeted:

Armory (excellent alt Bitcoin client) is crowdfunding. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64449.0;all #bitcoin



Let's get those BTC flowing into etotheipi's rocket address and get him working on Bitcoin fulltime!

Oh yeah. The original reason I came to this thread.

I tried to donate with a credit card, but the payment page never loaded

I'll donate with bitcoin soon

What benefit do you see in having the blockchain in javascript?

Build a web app that uses javascript to interact with the armory server's JSON-RPC.  "Easy" web wallet with everything that Armory has.  I say "easy" because it's a lot of work to build a good web wallet even if the logic is mostly in armory.  It also definitely isn't easy for the armory dev.