Topic: How do Paper Wallets work? I'm completely mystified (Read 5210 times)

Have you considered fork detection?  Tracking all active forks just requires that you code the hash function correctly.

You could have a warning on your GUI if any fork is receiving more than 5% of the total mining power. 

Pop-up a big warning (and disable transactions) that the network isn't able to agree on the main fork.

If you have verified the current chain and the current chain is receiving 99% of the hashing power, then everything is good.

The disadvantage with the scheme is that if someone creates an alt-chain by hard forking, your code would detect it.  This would require manually marking certain forks as not real.

Unfortunately, that's the "cost" of security.  Some would argue that the alternatives are really not that insecure.  And they're kind of right.  But Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind is the gold standard of network security (kind of, by definition, but doesn't matter).  So that's what I gotta go with to make sure that Armory users don't end up on arbitrary hard forks due to subtle bugs in some reimplementation detail. 

I'm working on making it smoother... but I got a ways to go, yet...

I was starting to think I was the only one seeing this!   I am getting real tempted to go back to an older version that did not have this problem of  always needing to reindex the blockchain.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/reindexing-blocks-on-disk-184125

I have integrated an entire lecture on how to create a paperwallet in my free course:

https://www.udemy.com/bitcoin-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-crypto/

I will also release a lecture on Armory that will explain the same thing.

No no no.  Thank you for your patience!  I'm surprised your still beating your head against it after the troubles you reported.  For reference, I think most users have less difficulty than that.  The program wouldn't be very popular if everyone had to go through it.  So you probably got unlucky.  Or had too little RAM (yeah... the major upgrade I'm working on is making it much more lightweight)

There is the Offline Wallet Tutorial.  It's kind of wordy.  We're working on an illustrated tutorial with screenshots right now.

Just bear in mind, up until this point, I've been the only person developing Armory.  So, keeping up with the website has been a little ... low priority.  Thanks again for your patience.  Please continue this conversation over in the Armory subforum.

OK, I'll give it a bash 

It'll be sometime tomorrow, hopefully, when it's finished downloading the block chain.

Heck, the gutless little thing took 10 mins just opening the app. Powerful it isn't.

I'm in Malaysia, nearly 4 AM here. I'll leave the Macbook running but for now I'm off to bed.. In the meantime do you have a link or could you explain how one uses the signature thing to send money without a private key? I found a "message signing" thing, with a screen full of fields? Is that it? How does one use it?


And thank you for your patience...

Oh please try it anyway.  It turns out that it does work on some 10.7.  I thought it was 10.8, but some 10.7'ers reported success.  I still haven't figured out the conditions that cause it to not work.

Nope, aint gonna work. Your site says it's for 10.8, my little laptop is runnng OSX 10.7

 

Only recently was I able to add support for OSX, and it's not universal.  No guarantees that it works, there.  But there is a downloader on the site.

I asked if the 64 bit thing was the problem and you said 'Yeah.'

 

Alternatively it could just be this POS computer. It's the worse computer I've ever owned in my life, crashes 4 or 5 times a day and it's only 2 months old. It's actually LESS reliable than the 3 year old computer I was replacing.

My next PC will be a Mac.

Does Armory work on Mac? Yay! It doe.... ah. Sort of.

I got so sick of this new machine freezing up (and absolutely HATE Windows 8 ) that I bought a 2nd hand MacBook Pro, to ease my transition to Macs. Lemme try installing on that..

Wait what?  It does work.  Just use 32-bit.  It works on all architectures.

Well that sucks.


Thanks anyway.




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Yeah.   There is only one version of the clients for each Bitcoin and Armory.  32-bit runs fine on 64 bit arch as long as it doesn't use more than 4GB RAM

Uninstalled the QT client, tried downloading again..

http://bitcoin.org/en/download

This only gives us Windows users the option of a file called bitcoin-08.1.win32setup

"win32"?

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit - is that the problem?


 

Stop trying to put me off; I'm doing a great job of that all by myself thankyouverymuch. 

Regarding usability, I've been playing with it..

1. I got the general idea of an offline wallet and a 'watching only' wallet - but how to create a watching wallet? There's nowhere in the software that seems intuitive.

Eventually found a reference on the 'quick start' thing, on your website. However that says you can make a wallet watch-only in the "wallet properties".

Nope.

Not until I finally gave up looking and deleted the wallet... and THEN it offered the option of deleting just the private keys, making it a watch-only version!

2. But wait...

I was given 2 options, delete completely, or just the private keys. A pretty clear-cut, yes or no question, using radio-button selectors.

Except I could not unselect the "delete completely" option.

Once again some head-scratching before finally giving up and saying yeah, delete everything, completely.. and THEN it produced a watch-only version!

Stop doing that!


3. Help files.

Firstly, it has that classic (cliche?) thing, where you click on 'Help' in an open-source software and instead of helping it gives a long-winded overview of all the changes from previous versions.

As a sales copywriter that is PAINFUL to me. Nobody cares about previous versions; tell me how to use this one?

Your quick-start guide isn't even linked in the software, let alone readable offline inside it?

Mmm, just to double-check that I restarted and got this:


There was an error starting the underlying Bitcoin engine. This should not normally happen. Usually it occurs when you have been using Bitcoin-Qt prior to using Armory, especially if you have upgraded or downgraded Bitcoin-Qt recently (manually, or through the Armory automatic installation). Output from bitcoind:
StdErr:

: Error opening block database.
Do you want to rebuild the block database now?


See what I mean? So I have to wait another 8 hours or so now?

Also there's no 'Yes/No' to select, it asks the question but there's no way of answering it.

In the box below it offers the option of reinstalling the bitcoin software. Seriously?

Let's try the QT thing... Well it opened but 'Error opening database"....  So that was the "output" above? *sigh* OK...

"Catching up  2.4% done"


*fumps head on desk*

Sounds like you and Armory weren't meant to be together.  The initial download will still be required, but the rest of it will be improving dramatically in the near future.  Reduced resource usage and near-instant startup time.

The reason to use Armory is that when you create the offline wallet, you can put the watching-only wallet on your online computer and it behaves identically to a regular wallet.  You can generate millions of addresses, without the private keys on the online computer, and you can verify incoming payments just like a regular wallet.  The key feature is that spending the coins from the offline wallet only takes 1-2 minutes with a USB key to get the signature from the offline computer. 

Lots of people have figured out how to put their private keys offline and try to watch them from the online computer.  But no one else has figured out how to actually make that wallet usable.  If it requires any command-line, or re-distribution/synchronization of data between online and offline, it's inferior to Armory.  But obviously, Armory has some work to do on the other dimensions of usability.

Nope.

My PC froze up/crashed the first time, 2nd time it took about 15 mins to get back online, including a 4 minute wait for it to scan my transaction history. I've never made a transaction in my life. 

I can see this is probably quicker, and cheaper, than driving into town and depositing cash into some bank to send. And it's semi-anon', so there's that. For making micro-payments though, such as paying to view webpages or an online tip jar? No-one is gonna hang around for 10 or 20 mins while their wallet opens.

For savings it makes sense I guess but I don't think I could use this as my day to day wallet, but if you're NOT using it daily then it takes even longer to start up.

Mmm.

All right for paper wallet savings kind of thing I guess. Penalty for early withdrawal? You have to wait. And wait. Then wait some more.

Anyway, sorry for clogging the thread with my musings and mumblings (grumblings). 

OK, question - if I download the bitaddress.org web page, create a key pair offline, print off the secret key and use Multibit, entering just the public key, what's wrong with that? How exactly is this QT client and armory thing better than that?

Or is that a really dumb question?

Mmm.

Well that's the thing, it synced once before, then started again.

Well it's finally finished, and NOW it (Armory) says it's online.

Presumably it has to catch up with the block chain before it considers itself online? I was confused with that because in the FAQ for paper wallets it talks of an online and an offline install, so I thought it was in the wrong mode or something.

Well let's test it a bit, gonna reboot, re-open the software and see if it syncs fast...

Recent blocks are thoroughly checked and that's why they take more time to synchronize. Let it some time, you only have to go through it once .

Your add-on seems fine, it's the base client that seems to be the problem.

I uninstalled it before, because it did the same thing, took forever to finally catch up, then a day or two later gave some error message and started all over again. That's why I switched to Multibit.

However it seems Multibit isn't encrypted and so not overly secure, so when I heard of Armory I was hoping it was a good compromise between the two.

If the QT thing means it can, and does, take 8 hours just to open and use the software then that's a non-starter for me.

Mmmm, just tried loading it again, now it says 95%.. 12 minutes. That's a bit better, though.. ah, 13... 15 minutes.. It's going UP? Well waited 5 mins, now says 96% and still 15 minutes. Crazy.

Yet to do the paper wallet thing I should ideally have an old PC or netbook offline? All 4 of my cores are currently over 85%, this is a 2 month old 64 bit PC with 8 GB RAM and Win7 on a SSD and it's straining with this. How long would an Atom-powered netbook take?

Ah, 98% - 2 hours.

2 hours?

Also says in red that it's "offline'. Why? My modem is going crazy, currently at 199 kps, it's very much online.

I love the concept of bitcoin, I'm a strong libertarian and understand the economics. Heck, I just want to buy one coin and store it safely, just as a vote of confidence really, and to understand the system so I can explain it to others. However I'm getting a strong deja vu feeling from various other open source projects, raw, never actually finished and polished, overly complex and hours spent on a forum trying to figure things out.

I would say "I'll be back in 6 months when you've finished it" but experience tells me open source stuff never IS finished.

Not moaning at you, just ranting at the world of bitcoin in general I'm very close to giving up entirely right now.




A.