Topic: MultiBit - page 88. (Read 336309 times)

Don't know if this has been suggested before, but it'd be a great feature to see bitcoin value in dollars right in the client. Not super critical, but I think it'll help the regular joe once it gets around to that. BTW, really diggin' multibit. Very slick.

Thanks for your feedback steelhouse.
I thought I would try to answer your questions, together with other ones I have been asked such as:
"Where are the private keys stored ?",
by describing what MultiBit is actually doing.


A day in the life of MultiBit:

1. When you install MultiBit, is comes with a recent blockchain. This is about half the install download.

2. You start up MultiBit and it connects to bitcoin full nodes - i.e. nodes running bitcoind - in the normal peer-to-peer fashion. (You can also configure it to connect to a specific node if you want.)

3. MultiBit loads from disk the user's wallet file. The user's private keys are stored in the wallet.

4. MultiBit starts downloading new blocks from the peers. These are exactly the same blocks as you see on, say, blockexplorer.com.

5. It passes the new blocks to the wallet and says to it:
"Have a look at these new blocks and see if there are any transactions of interest to you."

6. The wallet looks through the new blocks' transactions and stores (in the wallet) the transactions that either send it bitcoin or that confirm its previous spends.

7. MultiBit stores the headers only of the new blocks into its local copy of the blockchain,   It does not store the transactions themselves. This is the main reason the MultiBit blockchain is so much smaller than the bitcoind blockchain.

8. MultiBit then waits for new blocks to appear from the peers and repeats.

I hope this answers your questions but if anything is not clear just ask.

This is great, how does it compress the block chain.  Does it use someone else's block chain?  This is great it is so small and fast, but I wonder in laymans terms how it works?   I wonder if it protects the network?  Is it just a online wallet disguised as a client?

We now have a German translation for MultiBit !

Thanks to freemoney458, on this site, for doing this translation for us.
Here is a screenshot - there are a couple of terms I have added in the last day or two in English, but other than that it is a complete translation.

http://multibit.org/postImages/german.png

p.s. it will appear in the next beta's installers.

Cool. I'll give it a spin.

MultiBit does not touch any existing wallet.dat.

The default wallet is stored as 'multibit.properties' in the installed MultiBit application directory itself. (Or inside the application bundle on a Mac).

Note that the default multibit.properties location will actually change as it causes problems if you are logged into an account that does not have administrator rights.   I will definitely keep it well away from the Satoshi client's wallet.dat though.

What happens with my current wallet when I install a new client? Will MultipBit create a new Wallet.Dat or does it look for something, if it's already there? Just want to make sure I don't end up deleting my current wallet or something awesome like that.

freemoney458 - thanks !  Yes we wanted to put Cryptonomicon in as the purchase as it is such an appropriate book for bitcoin.

mameise - yes - I have just been writing a 'swatch generator' into MultiBit so that the user can create them.   This should go into the next beta.   In the receive bitcoin panel when you type in the label and amount it creates a swatch automatically in the panel on the right hand side so that you can copy it out of MultiBit.  It will still be in BTC though as we do not have any exchange look up in MultiBit yet.

I am hoping to do betas about every two weeks or so until the 0.2.0 work is all done.

Hi,

just found this and thought the bitcoin swatches would be great for sells.
Problem: I cannot find to make them in your program.

it would be great to have an api or something.
i think it would be much more easier when we could put in our receiving adress, a label and the amount and it would generate such a swatch like you used it.
it also would be great to enter an amount in usd or € instead of btc, and it converts into btc using mtgox or so.

if this would be possible, it would looks great so maybe you can think about it.

thanks

I tried it like you explained, and now it works fine.  
Really seems to be something MS Word specific.

Congratulations to the new homepage and to the youtube screencast. The homepage looks great!
Good purchasing choice during the screencast, too (one of my favourite readings and in a way fitting to the subject).

Gary Rowe and I have given the http://multibit.org website a new look to make it easier to use.
It also has links to our YouTube channel where you can see our most recent screencast:

"Using MultiBit to buy online with a Bitcoin swatch"

http://youtube.com/user/MultiBitOrg

At the moment you have to drop the QR code right onto the existing QR code on the send screen for it to get recognised. (I will most likely change this in the future to make it easier). Try that.

Also, it might be something specific to the format of data coming from Word. Try dragging a 'receive' QR code to your Mac *desktop* (which I know works) and then switch to the send screen to drag it back. That would give me a clue that it is Word specific.

Hi,

I just tried out the Version 0.2.0beta1 under Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a MacBook.
The installer works without any problem, and so does the client.

I just seem too dumb to get the QR codes working.
Copying from the Receive screen to MS Word is possible, but dragging a QR code into the Send screen has no effect.

Any suggestions?

Hello Everybody,

There is a new beta available for MultiBit. The download details are at:

http://multibit.org/download.html
http://multibit.org


Version 0.2.0beta1
Enhancements
+  More language work done - English, Russian, Spanish, Swedish complete.
    French, Italian, Norwegian coming along nicely.
    Improved language picker in preferences screen.
+  Installers for Windows, Linux and DMG file for Mac.
+  Copy and paste added to address field.
+  Fee added to send confirm screen.   Send confirm screen improved.
+  User interface now uses system look and feel for better integration.
+  Added 'singleConnectionNode' option into multibit.properties.
+  Various user interface tidy ups.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this beta.

That is actually quite a subtle point about what has access to the wallet files for updating.

Because you don't want lots of processes 'fighting' over access to the same wallet files I plan to do the following:

+  You open up MultiBit and it displays a list of wallets.   You now have one MultiBit window on the screen and one Java Virtual Machine (JVM) running.   This JVM will do all the reading and writing to the wallets and keeping them up to date.
+  When you want to view a second wallet, or you want to drag and drop between wallets, you will start up another MultiBit window (with everything - amount, buttons, status bar etc) using a menu option I have not decided on yet.   Something like "File | new MultiBit window".
+  At this point you have 2 MultiBit windows but you still only have 1 JVM.   This makes coordination between the MultiBit windows and the thing doing all the updating of the files easier to control and less error prone.  (For the technically minded: You can have JVM level file locks in Java 6+).

This would be the approach for multiple windows on the same machine.   I think it is probably a bad idea to have distinct MultiBits on different machines looking at a common wallet on, say, a network drive.   That is just asking for something to go wrong so I doubt I will support that.

You are right I think that there will be a third stage where the blocks are so large that only servers will be processing all the transactions.   I hope by then we will have the infrastructure to have our hosted private keys either fully encrypted (as I believe BCCAPI does) or some other cryptographic technique is used to protect us from private key theft.


RE: Multiple wallets.
The full description for the multiple wallets functionality is given here:
https://github.com/jim618/multibit/wiki/Supporting%20multiple%20wallets

In brief it is:
+  A 'My Wallets' button shows a screen listing the wallets (with their balances etc).
+  You have one wallet at a time as your 'Active Wallet' - chosen with a radio button.
+  The send, receive, transactions pages then work with that one wallet.
+  At the top of the screen is a combo box indicating the active wallet.   You can use the combo box to switch your active wallet.

This stops the user interface becoming too cluttered with too many tabs and buttons.


RE: RPC and mining:   Because MultiBit is a 'dumb client' it does not offer an RPC interface to the outside world.   It only has a connection to the full nodes supplying it with blocks and then just asks them for blocks and transactions.   MultiBit is not mining.  Because of that it will not be generating coinbase transactions - you can still of course send coins from a mining pool to it using a bitcoin address you control.   

MultiBit's design goal is to be quite lightweight in use and so does not repeat the RPC/ mining functionality of the main client. (This cuts down the level of complexity considerably as you can imagine).


RE: MultiBit becoming 'stable' rather than 'experimental'.   There is still quite a lot to go into MultiBit before it is the sort of thing you want your grandma to use so it will be experimental for a while yet I think.   It will get there in the end but it takes a remarkably long time to make something production quality.   As an indication of how long, it has taken me about 4 months to get it to where it is now.

The Satoshi client is the place to keep your Big Savings Stash of bitcoins, especially now that the private keys are encrypted.

Just to let people know:

I will be presenting "MultiBit - a demo of the latest developments"
at the Bitcoin European Conference in Prague in November (25-27).

Should be an interesting conference.

If you want to follow #eurobit there is a bitcointalk.org thread dedicated to it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/european-bitcoin-conference-2011-prague-nov-25-27-40272

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate very much the dedication you took for answering.

I will try it out.

Glad that you plan it and take it over exactly from the standard client.

You are right, it is about interoperability AND not depending on a specific technical solution (client, format of data storage).
Your plans sound reasonable to achieve these goals.
What I am still missing is an import/export button for e.g. bitbills or the like, meaning a solution which needs no programming skills and is easy to handle for the average joe.

I completely agree.

I have to admit that I have not sent bitcoins myself, I got this idea just from reading the forums. So I could be mistaken.
My use case is the following:
1) I create a 100% secure off-line savings wallet like described in https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/howto-create-a-100-secure-wallet-17240
2) I save the encrypted wallet in different locations. I could also choose to store just the key to this ONE address in different ways, e.g. as a QR code (encrypted of course).
3) I copy ONE bitcoin address from this wallet and use it as my 100% secure savings address
4) I send bitcoins to this ONE address from lesser secure online exchanges or from other bitcoin clients.
    I can do this overs years without connecting the 100% secure wallet to the internet and still receive the bitcoins because the network stores the transactions for me. So all of my bitcoin savings are stored in a single address.

Nothing new until now, the tricky part comes when I want to spend bitcoins from the 100% secure savings address.
5) I start again my live CD with unix, connect it to the internet and send a small part of my savings to some other address.

Here lies the problem (if I understand the behaviour of the client correctly):
The client sends out part of the savings to the address where I want the coins to be spent.
The remaining part of the savings the client will send to a newly created address in my wallet (with new private key).
Now my 100% secure savings address is EMPTY and I have to use a new address for the remainder of my savings.
This forces me to store my wallet again in order not to loose the bitcoins.
But now the wallet and the new address has seen an internet connection, so I can not be sure that nobody already got access to the private key of the new savings address.

So my preferred solution for this dilemma is:
6) When executing 1) I offline create TWO wallets with a 100% secure address in each. Both are different of course.
7) When spending bitcoins from the 100% secure savings address, I tell the client that it shall send the remaining part of the bitcoins to the 100% secure address in the second wallet. Since this adress has been created offline and the wallet has never seen any internet connection, the private key to this address is still secure. So now I still have a 100% secure savings address.


Regarding your other comments I will need more time to investigate. You gave me a lot to chew through.
Again, thank you for your answer.

Very interesting 2112 - that protocol is obviously new to me.

I think you are right that bitcoin generally suffers from 'not invented here' syndrome.   I will have a look at that.   Something that is 1992 vintage must already have an open source Java implementation.

Cheers

Edit: Open source Java FIX protocol code = http://www.quickfixj.org/

It is much easier that you make it. Pretty much everything on Earth that is fungible is being traded using FIX protocol. With the curious exception of Bitcoin, where the primitive one-directional JSON-RPC rules. The multi-exchange trading software exists for over a decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange
http://www.fixprotocol.org/

It is very curious form of myopia or gazing at their own navel. It is almost like the Bitcoin community is somehow trying to reinvent the whell and is hell bent on square whells.