Hi Mike,
Where someone has an existing (random key) wallet I can't see a way of showing it / using it in MBHD without there being individual random private keys that need backing up.
If the message to the user is 'write these words down and you can get your bitcoin back' that is relatively simple.
You could say 'oh everything is in the cloud' but that will have a non-trivial failure rate eg:
'Oh I never set that up'
'Oh I wondered what those firewall messages were'
I figure if we have all of:
+ HD wallets only with strong insistence to write your seed mnemonic down.
+ local backups (basically the backup system that is in MultiBit now)
And
+ cloud backup of an encrypted copy of your wallet
(Ie triple redundancy)
Then the overall failure rate (meaning a loss of bitcoins) will be as low as possible.
Then when trezor comes onstream the attacks from having a compromised host computer also go down. As trezor only supports HD wallets it seems to make sense to only offer those.
The target audience is people with 'general PC knowledge' hence the overall simplification.
Topic: Going forward: MultiBit HD and MultiBit Classic - page 3. (Read 11174 times)
MBHD should be able to import existing wallets. I don't intend to break backwards compatibility for HD wallet support at least.
the naming convention used is a plus and easy to understand...good explanation as always going forward so users are aware of whats happening..thumbs up
While we're working out the new UI for MultiBit HD, we'd appreciate any feedback from MultiBit users about features you'd like to see and stuff you'd hate to see.
We can't guarantee that anything will find its way in but if enough people get together to ask for it then we'll certainly take that into account. Of course, pledges and sponsorship go a *very* long way to ensuring that your issue gets attention. :-)
Overall, the reasons for doing this are:
1) to reduce private key loss to near zero through hierarchical deterministic (HD) and hardware wallet support
We can't say exactly zero because someone, somewhere will ignore the messages to write down their seed phrase and we can't code for that. We will not be supporting random private keys in MultiBit HD.
2) to get away from Swing and the horrible Oracle Java installer
We will continue to use Java (the open source support libraries are vast) and Bitcoinj.
Tell us what you think in the comments!
We can't guarantee that anything will find its way in but if enough people get together to ask for it then we'll certainly take that into account. Of course, pledges and sponsorship go a *very* long way to ensuring that your issue gets attention. :-)
Overall, the reasons for doing this are:
1) to reduce private key loss to near zero through hierarchical deterministic (HD) and hardware wallet support
We can't say exactly zero because someone, somewhere will ignore the messages to write down their seed phrase and we can't code for that. We will not be supporting random private keys in MultiBit HD.
2) to get away from Swing and the horrible Oracle Java installer
We will continue to use Java (the open source support libraries are vast) and Bitcoinj.
Tell us what you think in the comments!
Gary and I, amoungst other things, had a long chat at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam over the direction to take MultiBit.
We reckon HD wallets are going to be much easier for users compared to the existing random key wallets. Even with all the work in MultiBit with backups there are still too many people losing their private keys and there are too many errors caused by importing and exporting private keys.
What we plan to do is to fork the MultiBit code so that there will be:
MultiBit HD
This will be a new UI where the user can create an HD wallet and do all the 'deterministic wallet' things.
This will also include the Trezor support (which uses HD wallets internally).
I have started writing the use cases for this here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18qtE5lmRzB32Sc9Ii37GySJGLKx3VNypBkjnHbNjdik
(this document will probably take me this week to write - it is all over the place at the moment).
MultiBit HD won't support the existing MultiBit random key wallets.
MultiBit Classic
The existing MultiBit code will be renamed to MultiBit Classic.
It will still be maintained for things like network access and if the fee structures change but there won't be any real development of it going forward. It will probably also start nagging you to move your bitcoin over to an HD wallet.
We reckon HD wallets are going to be much easier for users compared to the existing random key wallets. Even with all the work in MultiBit with backups there are still too many people losing their private keys and there are too many errors caused by importing and exporting private keys.
What we plan to do is to fork the MultiBit code so that there will be:
MultiBit HD
This will be a new UI where the user can create an HD wallet and do all the 'deterministic wallet' things.
This will also include the Trezor support (which uses HD wallets internally).
I have started writing the use cases for this here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18qtE5lmRzB32Sc9Ii37GySJGLKx3VNypBkjnHbNjdik
(this document will probably take me this week to write - it is all over the place at the moment).
MultiBit HD won't support the existing MultiBit random key wallets.
MultiBit Classic
The existing MultiBit code will be renamed to MultiBit Classic.
It will still be maintained for things like network access and if the fee structures change but there won't be any real development of it going forward. It will probably also start nagging you to move your bitcoin over to an HD wallet.
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