Topic: Bridgewalker: euro-denominated wallet for the Bitcoin economy[Now part of Hive!] (Read 5311 times)

The claim process is now active. An update should be available shortly through Google Play which will allow you to submit a Bitcoin address, where you would like to have your funds sent.

More details in this blog post: https://www.bridgewalkerapp.com/blog/2014/03/14/bridgewalker-shutdown/ .

To end things on a positive note, I will now be completely focusing on Hive Android, which should be arriving shortly - keep an eye out for it! And who knows, maybe at some point Bridgewalker will be rising from its ashes. ;-) Thanks again to all beta users and everyone who helped me out along the way!

It is with regret, that I have to announce, that I have decided to shut down Bridgewalker. With Mt.Gox ultimately imploding, I currently do not want to invest the effort to switch the backend to another exchange. I will write up a "post mortem" that will go into more details regarding my decision. All user funds will be refunded in full. I will announce a claim process for that in the coming days. Thanks to everyone who supported this project!

That's correct, unfortunately. I am traveling at the moment, but will give a more detailed update afterwards. Whatever happens though, all Bridgewalker users will be fully reimbursed. Sorry for the unavailability of the service at the moment.

May I ask the status of Bridgewalker now that MtGox has closed up shop?

I understand that it used MtGox to hold its reserves.

Bridgewalker is now open source! More info here: https://www.bridgewalkerapp.com/blog/2014/01/07/bridgewalker-open-source/ . Patches very welcome! :-)

Hi everyone,

We are extremely pleased to announce the acquisition of Jan Vornberger's Bridgewalker wallet for Android. We are also extremely pleased to announce that Jan will be joining the Hive team. Hive for Android will be available in late spring, 2014.

Wendell:


Jan:


Hive for Android's public repo will open in early January.

Discussion thread here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bridgewalker-acquired-hive-for-android-in-late-spring-2014-334383

I presented Bridgewalker at the BitcoinKonferenz in Cologne on October 22. There is now a recording available: http://youtu.be/YWKkuQ__N7c . The talk is in German, but I added English subtitles (using YouTube's caption feature) and translated slides.

Scratch that, discussion continues here. ;-)

I have quietly continued working on this, mostly fixing some smaller bugs and increasing stability and robustness of the software system. Some updates:

• I switched from USD to EUR as the counter currency for the time being. As I'm based in Germany and I wanted to focus more on in-person use cases, it makes it more practical for me to prototype it. Sorry to anyone who was relying on USD accounts! I hope to bring back USD and add other currencies at some point in the future.
• Uploaded an old presentation that I gave about green addresses (there called marker addresses): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iLV9zjxHFU . Bridgewalker has support for green addresses, so deposits coming from recognized green addresses are credited instantaneously.
• I put together a video demonstrating the app. It is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERVD1xoDT0M - although unfortunately already outdated again. =)
• Implemented preliminary backup functionality for guest accounts.

And Bridgewalker is now also on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/bridgewalkerapp .

As always: Feedback and comments much appreciated! :-)

Discussion continues here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bridgewalkers-new-value-proposition-an-exchange-rate-adjusted-bitcoin-wallet-228535

Version 0.4 of the app is out now and I have updated the website. I have slightly pivoted in how the idea and the service is presented. The new description reads like this:


Essentially I show your balance in BTC at all times to make it clear that this is really a Bitcoin wallet: Bitcoin in, Bitcoin balance, Bitcoin out. But that Bitcoin balance is adjusted up and down to create that "stable in respect to a counter currency" effect of the original Bridgewalker. It is really just a change in presentation, as the underlying system still works the same. But I'm hoping this presentation might make it easier for people to understand the value proposition and why such a service might be useful in some cases.

What do you guys think? I call it "exchange rate adjusted Bitcoin wallet" - does that term make sense to you? any better alternatives?

Quick update: I implemented a workaround to get rid of of the minimum limit of 0.01 BTC. Transactions down to 1 satoshi are now supported.

My impression is, that almost nobody actually bothers to jailbreak their device, even among those people who would be able to do it. So I don't know, it seems to me like that would be a very limited group of people to whom that would be a solution. But I'll keep it in mind!

@BitPay: A new version of the app is out which now completes the support for URI links - i.e. it also works now, when clicking a link somewhere. So that means all "must have"s according to lovebitcoins.org (which, by the way, is down at the moment (?) ) are present. :-)

So, iOS.   I understand your reluctance, what with Apple being the closed minded way they are, however..... Cydia     There'd still be a decent market (in fact I'd suggest the people who are into Bitcoin at this "early" stage are the same who'd have a jailbroken phone).

Anyway, just food for thought.

Perhaps Expensify could recommend Bridgewalker to their clients' contractors:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/expensify-now-offers-support-for-bitcoin-an-alternative-to-paypal-for-international-contractors/

http://help.expensify.com/bitcoin/

Yes, good point, I might have to do that, if all else fails. I would just prefer to have real-time updates. Mt.Gox seems to work on a new version of their Socket.IO server, maybe that will improve things.


Aw, thx for pointing that out, I will fix it in next update.


That's definitely something I find very interesting: Go into the next supermarket, buy a Bitcoin gift card denominated in USD ("$20 worth of bitcoins, for $20.25), load that up in Bridgewalker (with the added benefit of checking that you got your money's worth) and then spend it next door on cupcakes or on they other side of the globe on candy from Japan. And as mentioned before, I would consider it a goal to get that complete cycle down to 3 % and lower to be able to compete with credit cards. (At the moment I find all these "Bitcoin has low fees" claims a little bit dishonest. Yes, Bitcoin transactions themselves are fairly cheap, but pretty much anything practical you will do with Bitcoins _today_ will involve some currency conversion steps, which are unfortunately not cheap yet.)

And by the way: Anytime Bitcoin gift cards come up, some people want to have them denominated in BTC. While that seems natural, I don't see how it would be practical at all. A supermarket etc. can not reprice items in their inventory every few days. It needs to be a fixed price for the supermarket and then some extra activation step where the actual conversion at current market price happens. Giftcoins.me got that part right and it is a very interesting project.

I'm not sure if there's been much in the way of chargeback/attack security testing on the Giftcoins.me cards yet - but you might consider something along those lines (or just linking out to resellers) to provide initial and simple BTC acquisition for public users who want to explore the network and for whom a USD denominated account makes more sense.

You could even provide an in-app system for linking to bitcoin retailers (and probably derive some additional revenue that way) which would enable users quick access to the bitcoin marketplace. If they have a wallet on their phone with $xxx.xx USD in it and it is their primary or exclusive access point to the btc network they may find the fact that they can save hugely on bitcoinstore (for example) and only ever experience the transaction in USD (or at least have the USD price on every page of their transaction).

The link to your forum profile is broken. You have it set to the logged in users profile.

For your profile specifically, you just need to append ";u=4070" at the end of "https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile".

why not using mtgox the polling data feed, it's super solid comparing to that shady streaming channel. The lag is unnoticeable most of the time.

You mean dangerous for the users? I am not sure I would call it "dangerous", but yes, the risk of slippage is assumed by the user. That's why the 1.5 % round trip fee is typical, not guaranteed. If you happen to use it in the middle of a crash you will probably end up paying more. That's why Bridgewalker always gives you an estimation on how high the currency conversion overhead is.

So as one of screenshots show, if I enter 5 USD, I see something like this: "Recipient will receive 0.10991995 BTC (~ 5.00 USD). From your account 5.03004 USD will be deducted. This is a difference of about 0.6 %". So in this case you paying 0.6 % more than the recipient will receive. And market spread is already taken into account here, because for the recipient a market order sell is assumed (albeit without any exchange fess the recipient might pay) and for you a market order buy for acquiring the bitcoins plus exchange fees is assumed. If there happens to be a much larger gap, you will see this percentage value going up and might want to wait for the markets to settle before doing your transaction. But in my testing over the last months this hasn't really been a problem for me.


Only Bitcoin.

What are the methods for getting cash in and out?