Topic: Interim solution until deterministic wallets can be implemented (Read 775 times)

"One backup ever" is a great advantage and I don't even think its the most compelling one.

The most important reason to use deterministic wallets is that it's the only way for offline wallets to be feasible, and this is important because storing private keys on online general purpose computers will never be suitable for more than trivial sums.

It's why I can't in good conscience recommend a standalone client that does not implement offline wallets. If you're going store private keys online you might as well go for maximum convenience and use blockchain.info. If you want to hold more bitcoins than what you feel safe storing on blockchain.info then you need some form of cold storage. Desktop clients without offline wallet capability don't offer any appreciable security or usability advantage over blockchain.info so I don't even know why they still exist.

Just throwing it out as an option.  If your existing app doesn't have a feature, you can always use one that does have it.  A lot of people just simply aren't aware that these alt clients exist.  You don't have to be comfortable with it, but you should know it exists.

As for backups... anything that requires a persistent backup solution will fail in the long run.  It won't fail for everyone, but it will fail enough that people will lose money unnecessarily.  Even if you are savvy and diligent, your backup solution may work for 6 months, then you reinstall your OS, or change computers, or your backup drive dies, and you procrastinate on fixing it and setting everything back up again (or you simply forget to re-enable it).  For most things in life, this is unfortunate, but not life-crushing the way losing your primary wallet would be. And now that you have to do persistent backups, you can't do them securely, because it needs to be easily replaceable for the next time you need to backup.  So you make multiple copies, you scatter them around, you keep them nearby.  There's always a risk.  There's always this uneasiness about whether you are sufficiently backed up.

This is why deterministic wallets are so epic in terms of Bitcoin usability.  You make your one backup, ever.  And it's 100%, forever.  You secure the $#!+ out of it (safe-deposit box, bury it, whatever), because it doesn't need to be replaced frequently.  You do it right, once, and forget about it.  And you can print it out on a sheet of paper which is guaranteed to last decades, unlike the digital media you have to save your 1000 private keys on.

Right now, I enjoy having a "market advantage" over Bitcoin-Qt in terms of helping users backup their wallets, but BIP32 really is a necessity for the long-term viability of Bitcoin (or any deterministic scheme).

Well, bitcoin, as it is right now, can only really be used by moderately computer savvy people. Backups are a given; these kinds of people have lost enough to be mindful about purposefully making backups of important files such as wallets.

A daily or weekly scheduled backup using nothing but batch files and task scheduler and RAR works for me. Linux users have cron.

And, no offense to Mr. Reiner, but I'm not yet switching completely to Armory until it starts using a new wallet format that allows compressed keys. I'll only use it for those escrow clients who would feel better if I used it. I'm comfortable enough that I personally don't feel the need to use it, but of course, if I'm doing escrow, it's other people's money.

An interim solution would be to use an alternative client that implements deterministic wallets.  Armory and Electrum both do.

I had a thought that it might be nice to automate backups of the wallet file.
Certainly this is not beyond the realm of moderately advanced users already, through scheduled system tasks/cron/whatnot, but those are not the ones who are likely to find themselves with a corrupted or deleted wallet, or a too-old wallet backup. I've found that even moderately technical people still fail to understand that wallet backups decay over time.

How would the community feel about the addition of an automated wallet backup option - through the standard backup interface, give the option to automatically take a new backup whenever new private keys are added to the wallet. Bonus points if the backup screen can detect the presence of cloud storage folders (eg. dropbox) to suggest these locations. Perhaps it would be prudent in such scenarios to require the wallet be encrypted in order to enroll in automated backup.