Topic: Bitcoin Wallet for Android - page 21. (Read 121199 times)

I have root on my device and I'm trying to replace my devices wallet files with the wallet.dat from my PC, but I don't see a wallet.dat file on my device. Do I have to get the private key from my PC wallet and export that? If so, how do I get my private key?

in this thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-is-it-going-76528 there are some usage statistics for bitcoinspinner, multibit and  blockchain.info wallet.
it would very informative if you could provide your statistics too. thank you!

And yes, there have been a few updates recently.  Thank you Goonie for all your recent work in this.

Yes, you can update.

Is it me or is the client getting updated a lot recently? Is it safe to update?

I just updated the app with French, Spanish, Turkish and Swedish from Transifex. Will be included in 2.15. Thanks for your help in translating!

However, I noticed that Transifex is far from ideal for Android. It reformats passages, effectively breaking layouts. For some reason, some translations replaced the "three dots" Unicode character with three separate dots. So there is still some manual work necessary. Also, it can't deal with HTML entirely, so all the help pages are not represented there.

When will you update the app with the new translations form transifex?

I released beta 2.14 of Bitcoin Wallet:

http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/downloads/detail?name=bitcoin-wallet-2.14.apk

I have changed some things around autosync. If you feel like it, would you update and tell me if your problem is still there?

Feedback via bugtracker is appreciated:

http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/issues/list

On further observation, I'm pretty sure Mike Hearn is right on this one - it appears it is connecting all on its own at half past every hour, then disconnecting.

I tried turning off 'sync on charge' and closed the program (selecting "Disconnect") but it still does it. I will try restarting my phone and see if that makes a change.

This is not intended. Could you use the issue tracker for bugs like these?

http://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/issues/list

I'm not continually reading this forum, so I will miss some posts.

The sync on charge feature is undergoing some flux at the moment - Andreas is experimenting with different things. It has been changed to "sync every hour as long as you have sufficient battery power" without being relabeled, I think, so if you disable sync on charge it'll stop doing that.

As I said, for me at least, it doesn't have much battery impact. But this is on a Galaxy Nexus with ICS, so top-end hardware. It may vary for you.

I think the next step is "sync hourly if you have battery power, with an option to limit usage to wifi only". On ICS you could also have it automatically stop if you're approaching your monthly 3G data limit.

Longer term, the ability to set Bloom filters on connections and restrict address announcements means that in theory, you could maintain a set of P2P connections indefinitely with minimal battery drain, so you'd receive coins the moment they were sent to you, even if the phone was asleep. It requires some protocol upgrades and could put our supply of sockets under strain again if not implemented well, so I wouldn't hold your breath for that. A solution based on a relay server that talks C2DM to the client is a shorter term approach but it's less decentralized.

Yes, but the program still starts when I'm not charging.

Is sync on charge turned on?

I like that this version of Bitcoin Wallet has a "disconnect" feature. However, I am noticing that this app Bitcoin Wallet is randomly starting up and connecting to nodes at apparently random intervals. I choose the "Disconnect" option and it disconnects, and then will randomly start up again at a later time. I am running this on a Droid 4 running Android 2.3.6.

it took about 30mins for me to download the whole blockchain.

the whole application footprint seems to be about 42mb. this is very impressive - or does the blockchain go extra?

You can sync 8 hours of transactions in less than two minutes..  If you funded your mobile wallet that long ago, it'll be one of earlier blocks that gets synced which means you don't have to wait until its fully caught up.

If you've turned your phone off and load your email, I'm guessing you'll wait a similar amount of time for it to download 8 hours of emails/attachments fully.  Perhaps not if nobody emails you/you receive very little email.

This 'phone is off' argument is very much an edge case because I think you'll find most smartphones have a lag time when first coming back on, regardless of what you're trying to do.

Now I am puzzled !
To send money, I need at least one confirmed unspent transaction.
If my wallet was empty (I don't like carrying around a large amount on my mobile), I just sent a refill to it from my desktop client at home. Now I am on the go and I realize my smartphone was off: what do I do. I wait..

I know it's an edge case, but if we are aiming for mass market, it will happen a lot of times, enough times for many people to look for a thin client solution.

Interesting, I'm not sure about the fact that it is that important to insist on mobile devices directly speaking the bitcoin protocol, but what I'm sure is that diverse opinions and point of views are a good thing

To send money you don't need the latest chain, unless you're sharing keys between wallets and might risk creating a double spend (so don't do that). In fact you don't even need internet access. You can start Bitcoin Wallet and send the raw transaction via NFC directly to another phone. Bluetooth and QRcodes are also possible.

To receive (confirmed) money, you need to sync. Downloading and parsing data is cheap - modern ARM CPUs and Android JITCs are very efficient. The biggest battery suck in smartphones is the screen by far, and after that the radio. I have Bitcoin Wallet set to sync every hour in the background. I unplugged it at 8am, and at 4pm Android Wallet has used 3% of my battery. That's without any fancy optimizations as we are currently discussing. Facebook has used 14% of the battery!

On the user experience issue in general - we're here despite that Bitcoin is currently a pain to use, because it's decentralized. To make Bitcoin happen Satoshi had to solve some extremely hard technical problems and he did a fantastic job of it. To keep Bitcoin decentralized, we must follow in his footsteps and solve the difficult problems we face. I am absolutely sure we can make the mobile wallet experience both fully decentralized  (connect to the p2p network) and every bit as slick as the most centralized payment app. It isn't easy, and we aren't quite there yet, but we aren't here to solve easy problems.

Do you suggest a smarter strategy when battery low, no charger available, need the phone in a couple hours to make a transaction, don't need it that much right now ?

Of course, if I can update the chain without using up battery power, that's a major improvement.
I am still unconvinced that the user experience will ever be as smooth as compared to a thin client. When paying, people want the transaction done in seconds: every second counts.