Topic: MultiBit - page 31. (Read 336309 times)

Thanks !

Trying to make sure people don't lose their private keys is a challenge (as most people probably don't even know what they are).
For perfect security the backups would not be created but I think in reality they are needed.

Deterministic wallets, with a keyphrase mnemonic, will certainly help here.

WOW! What a smart system! Thank you for the explanation! Makes perfectly sense.

Hi CogSci,

That is very observant of you. I don't think anyone else has noticed exactly what the MultiBit wallet writing strategy is.

There are two separate things going on simultaneously:

1) Whenever MultiBit saves a wallet (say: example.wallet) it does the following:
    1.1 Copies the existing example.wallet to a timestamped backup. (Something like example-20130123182701.wallet.)
    1.2 Writes the wallet that is in memory to the file example.wallet.
    1.3 Secure deletes the previous timestamped backup that it wrote the last time it saved the wallet. (There is only one level of backup).

It does this every time it writes the wallet, for any reason.
The reason for doing this is so that if 'something bad' happens (eg immediate power loss) you will always have one good copy of the wallet, even if it is one write out of date. When you start MultiBit if the expected wallet is missing it will automatically load the backup.

2. When you encrypt a wallet it encrypts all the keys with your password and writes the wallet. You then have:
    2.1 the example.wallet encrypted.
    2.2 the backup wallet will be the version before the encrypt, which is unencrypted as you state correctly.

The next time the wallet writes you will have:
3.1 The example.wallet which is encrypted together with the latest changes that have just been made.
3.2 The backup wallet is the encrypted wallet from 2.1
3.3 The previous backup (the unencryped wallet from 2.2) is secure deleted by overwriting all the bytes with a nonsense pattern and then deleting the file.

The wallets write pretty often (if you change anything on the screens it gets marked as dirty and a background thread will write it within 2 minutes, when a transaction arrives, when a block arrives, immediately if you create a new receiving address, immediately when you do a send) so the unencrypted wallet will disappear from your drive within a few minutes.

I hope that makes sense.
It is a compromise between security and "things that can go wrong will go wrong" driving the need for a rolling backup.

You have probably also noticed that when you encrypt the wallet (or add a receiving address, import keys or change the password) MultiBit also automatically writes a timestamped, encrypted export of the private keys. The export is encrypted with the wallet password. I added this because I found that people didn't appear to be backing up their private keys. This is the number one way to recover your wallet in case of a "bad thing happening" so I thought it was worth being automatic.

I've been playing with this beta version (0.5.7) a bit yesterday. Please help me understand this password protection feature! It seems like when I open a wallet that I created with 0.4x, and add a password to it, this beta version does a backup of my wallet, plus one password protected version. Now, there is no point of having a wallet password protected, while at the same time I have an unprotected (backup)version floating around in the same folder(?). So, which file(s) do I need to move to a saver place, if any, to have only the password protected wallet in my working folder? Or maybe I misunderstood the whole principle? BTW, I'm on Kubuntu, if that makes a difference, and yes, I have multiple backups at save places. ;-)

I uninstalled and re-downloaded the client and I can now set it to 0.0001, but setting it lower still doesn't give me a message or anything. Strange. o.O

I gotcha. I'll keep up with this thread for further updates then

Sounds like a bug - you should be able to set it to 0.0001 and even if you set to something else it should give you a message. I will have a look.

Good to hear the encryption is working ok for you.
Can't really give an update on when it will be out - still working through review comments. (these are to make the code better and more usable for other people).

I think I found a possible glitch in the 0.5.7beta client, but I'm not 100% sure: I can't seem to change the transaction fee below the default setting (0.001, I believe). Whenever I change the fee and apply the changes it reloads the preferences page and the fee goes back to the default. This only happens when trying to set it lower. I wasn't sure if this was a glitch or intentional.

On a side note: any update on when the official client release will have the encryption? Seems to work great on the beta

That looks a bit like Google Drive (previously their Google docs offering).

The main thing with localising is the phrases management. Crowdin is not perfect but it is pretty good (especially for the price!)

Qikpad looks pretty useful if you want to quickly work together on a doc with someone.

hi Jim,
have look this Instant Collaboration Tool for Language Translation http://qikpad.org may help

Please PM or email me the log files (multibit_debug.log and multibit_console.log) and I will have a look.

0.4.19
Same was on 0.4.17 and 5.5/7 betas.

Hi starik69,

What version are you using ?
I recently tidied up the refresh of the transactions page so if you are on an older version it would be worth upgrading to the latest release on the website and trying the reset again. Take a copy of your wallet and the file multibit.blockchain in your user data area case it makes no difference. then you can roll back the change by:
1) shutting down MultiBit
2) putting back the old wallet and multibit.blockchain files
3) starting up MultiBit

I have a btc adress with very many (thousands) of small transactions. When i add it to multibit wallet and try to reset blockchain multibit client begins to load transactions but after some dozens - hangs - stops responding. Only thing i can do - forcedly close javaw.exe and start multibit again. But after repeating this many times after full syncing i discover that some transactions are missing and the balance of the wallet differs from what i see on blockchain.

Can this be corrected?

BitcoinLand is a whole new continent, and we are still exploring !

:-)

Nice!

I do find it kind-of ironic that bitcoinj, electrum, bitcoin-qt, armory, et'all have all spent so much time on their own wallets.
Then everyone is going to need to support the common HD Wallet format in the future to be relevant.

But yes.  HD Wallets are very cool.

Even in OT land we have been talking about supporting them.

I haven't seen any discussion of it recently I must admit freemoney. I think this is just because there is quite a bit going on at the moment so no-one has the spare capacity to look at it.

Very nice plan!
I am missing multi-signature transactions on your list, though. Any plans to support these in bitcoinj or MultiBit?

Hi Finway.
I am working on it at the moment to get it releasable.  The functionality is all there in the beta code, which is available at:
https://multibit.org/releases

It is currently the 0.5.7beta version.
I doubt the UI will change much between now and when it is released so you can try it out now if you want to. Make sure your wallets are backed up.

It is 'just' a matter of finishing the code off, getting it into bitcoinj, building it into MultiBit, doing release candidate testing and putting it on the website. (Note the quotes on the 'just'!)

Hi Jim, MultiBit looks pretty now, but  still no wallet encryption support ?