Topic: Standardizing Bitcoin Terminology - page 2. (Read 6937 times)

More or less how I feel about it too


Now that's a pretty common sense way of dealing with it. File extensions are a great example of computing vernacular that IS accepted by the non-techie crowd, even my folks can distinguish between file extensions and appreciate the bearing they have on the practical use of a computer. They may not have liked it at first (I had a real struggle getting my pop to accept that he need to get this, as well as the hierarchical folder/directory structure concept), but once they do, it becomes an accepted necessity.  

I've been battling this question myself.

The important question to ask is "what do users interact with?"  Literally, what do they see on the interface?  They interact with "wallets", of various kinds.  They interact with "transactions" and "labels", and "confirmations", and "transaction amounts".  The names need to start simple, and have a hierarchy that accommodates the various gradations of user education.

You can't just call everything a "wallet" with no qualifiers, because that neglects the profound differences between different kinds of wallets.  For users that use nothing more than "online, maybe-encrypted wallets", using "encrypted" or "unencrypted" is all the qualifier they need.  But once you go beyond "standard" usermode, users have options and need to understand what those options are.  And that's a million times easier if there's consistent names between the applications giving them these options.  Armory uses deterministic wallets, Bitcoin-Qt uses "loose-key" wallets -- the user should care that "loose-key" wallets need to be backed up regularly.  In this sense, anything that will show up on the user interface to the 80th-percentile-and-lower user base, should have simple, unique, fewer-syllables-preferred names. 

Things that only matter to developers, can have as complicated a name as they wanted.  "TxOut trees" are fine because developers aren't actually developers if they're not used to things like that.  And "deterministic wallets" are fine for developers.  But for users, especially ESL and not-so-smart users, we need at least something they can call it, even if they don't understand it.

I agree with you the user should just see a wallet.

I wouldn't use the file extension to determine it's properties though.
In bitcoinj/ MultiBit there are various properties actually in the wallet ( version number, various flags etc) that indicate what it is capable of.

Personally I like having an iconography that shows what a wallet is capable of because:
+ humans are visual creatures
+ good icons are international

Are we trying to come up with terms for regular folks or computer folks?  I think the scope of the problem should be defined before really entertaining potential solutions.  If I look at this thread and pretend that we are trying to name a JPEG file, the suggestions sound to me like the following names for a JPEG: "Tri-chromatic quantized raster image".  "Non-palletized discrete cosine color map".   Meanwhile, the rest of the world has settled on calling these "photos", and calling them "JPEG's" where there is any need to make a distinction as to how the picture is encoded.

If I put myself into "regular folks" shoes, there should just be one thing: "bitcoin wallet".  You double click it (just like your e-mail inbox) and there's your bitcoins.  If you received more bitcoins while the wallet was closed, then the computer should think about it for a bit and then the bitcoins appear.  Anything more complicated than that screams "this is for computer experts only".  The Apple computer company has risen to stardom due to their intuitive grasp of this concept, and Microsoft is getting the burial it deserves.

Whether it's deterministic or not shouldn't even be in the regular user's lexicon.  Whether it's random or non-random or whatever, shouldn't be either.  Keep in mind that for the vast majority of users, if you simply tell them that a "bitcoin wallet" has the property of being able to spew out as many receiving addresses as they'll ever need, then they will take that at face value, without needing some sort of adjective qualifying the wallet as having that property.  

From a technical standpoint, what kind of wallet it is should be denoted by the file extension, and the differences between certain kinds of wallets should be assigned certain file extensions (the extensions themselves may or may not stand for anything).

This way, if they need to make a distinction, it might roll off the tongue the easiest by calling it a ".BW3 bitcoin wallet", automatically incorporating by reference the exact nature of the "determinism" and "randomness" inherent in using the wallet, the same way calling a picture a JPEG automatically implies usage of the discrete cosine transform and Huffman encoding without the user having to say or even think about these.

Afterwards, we can say that a ".dat wallet" sucks because (insert list of limitations here), and that for maximum benefit, you should convert it to a .bw3 wallet.  (imagining that a .bw3 wallet has the ability to accept a "JBOK" at the time of creation so payments to old addresses can continue to be received and spent away, but such a wallet will only issue new addresses generated deterministically).

I really do disagree. All these 3+ syllable terms are just fine for us here, we have the ability, and more importantly, the inclination to make sense of them. Everyday non-technical types will find it very off-putting. As if there isn't enough convoluted explanations required to help people understand Bitcoin already! And if people don't understand it, they'll either dismiss it or adopt the "watch and wait" attitude. Neither outcome is what anyone here should ideally want. Instead of coming up with the most perfect descriptive terms to satisfy the technical reality, maybe a little pragmatism wouldn't go amiss. We're not going to turn everyone into nerds overnight with our magic bean money, that just won't fly.

tl;dr : grow some mirror neurons!

What about:

+ a wallet contains either random addresses or linked addresses (= deterministic)

+ the wallet can be password protected (= private keys/master wallet key/seed are encrypted as appropriate) or not.

+ using any wallet you can create an observer wallet that is identical except you cannot spend (= no private keys, same deterministic algorithm if used). Maybe a better term is no-spend copy.

These are orthogonal so you could then annotate each wallet with:

+ Icon 1: showing 'randomness' or 'linkedness'
+ Icon 2: showing unencrypted or encrypted (like the MultiBit beta)
+ icon 3: if observer/ no-spend copy show an appropriate icon

You could reuse the icons between apps so that the user sees the same visual metaphor.

disclaimer: english is not my first language, so my proposals might suck.

i think observer wallet is not a bad start. problem is, its not really a wallet at all. its not a wallet that observes things, its exactly the other way around. so something like "wallet observer" would be better imho. personally, i like "wallet monitor".

regarding (non-) deterministic wallets, i think it mostly depends on what you want to emphasize. the idea of determinism might be a bit tough to put into any short formulation. "permanent wallet" vs. "loose key collection" contains a good idea imho. why not just call them static and dynamic wallets?

Another aspect when talking about properties of "wallets": what about distinguishing between wallets and keyrings? A wallet is typically more than a collection of keys or keypairs. It also contains transaction data, and meta data like accounts. Properties like deterministic, loose, watch-only etc. refer either to a keyring or to an individual key, not the wallet. A wallet could contain several keyrings with different properties.

BTW, I don't think deterministic is too technical.

There's plenty of "slang" that can be used.  I know that whatever we decide here will not automatically change the way people talk about these concepts.  It would be fine to even put in the glossary that "Sometimes "offline wallets" are referred to as "cold storage"".  But the important part is that application developers, in their apps, stick to consistent terminology.  Then, new users who don't read the forums have consistency across (and even within!) applications.  I mention "within", because even I've sometimes used different names for these things in different parts of Armory.

Hot wallet, cold wallet, air-gapped wallet, deterministic wallet, are terms I use. They will change when technology changes. I like the gun analogy of single and double action for multisig transaction.

What about "infinite wallet"?   By this I mean an analogy with "infinite lists" in programming languages.

Infinite lists can also be called "iterators" or "lazy lists", so the same idea could bring "lazy wallet" or "iterating wallet".

"Permanent"

Deterministic wallets are permanent in the sense that you only need to back them up once.

"pre-determined" sounds terrible.  People would immediately think that there is someone, somewhere, who can recreate a copy of any such wallet.


I actually agree.  Deterministic should be fine imho.  But if we really want something less technical,  I like the crystal metaphor.


What about "reproducible"?

I prefer "pre-determined". It's an identical concept to deterministic, but I expect it would confuse fewer people. Obvious follow up question for the uninitiated would be "What aspect is pre-determined?". I can't see as many people being confused or put off by the expression.

Another way of looking at it could be to not to distinguish between deterministic wallets and regular wallets, and instead refer to wallets that possess the qualities of either "Calculated addresses" or "Random addresses". 

Poetry for a technical term ? No sorry.

Maybe Procedural ? I don't think deterministic is too technical.

Anyway it's not the wallet that's E1 it's the generation of addresses in said wallet.
So Sequentially generated wallet?

Finding a name for E1 is quite challenging if "deterministic wallet" is too nerdy.

What about a rather poetic image?   I have two in mind:

1.   "Crystal wallet".  Because it can grow from a small seed (just like crystals)

2.   "Phoenix wallet".  Because if you lose it, it's not a big deal since you can recreate it from its ashes (well, kind of)

PS.  I have a big preference for "Crystal wallet", which sounds very cool and is a good metaphor imho.

A poll would be impossible here because of the endless things to vote on.  However, what I've done is bolded my personal preference, and will update as new consensus is reached.

Please help with the more-advanced names.  I can't even think of good names besides "Distribution".  Though names that are descriptive with good abbreviations ("distro") are always good.  But prefer something not too generic. 

While I don't have my heart set on it, I was more serious than not with this one: just like JBOD in the disk storage world, JBOK implies it's a sort of hack that lets you make maximum utilization of a hodgepodge of mismatched junk leftovers on the cheap, while considering reliability and fault-tolerance to be a low priority.  Just like JBOD, it also implies that you should only use this technology for things you can easily replace, don't mind losing, or will be protecting in some other way.

If the whole point of choosing a somewhat pejorative term is to convey a sense of deprecation, clean localization isn't quite a must, as long as it's translated into something equally bulky and ridiculous sounding... assuming translation is necessary at all (French people still listen to "MP3" files despite "Motion Picture Group Layer 3" translating to something else with different initials in French, and without regard for MP3 files not being a "motion picture")

You should make polls for the candidates

Hmmm, observer wallet works for me too, it takes care of the one-way aspect and the directionality. Maybe "one-way" is a more appropriate fallback description for those individuals with below average abstractive imaginations (computer programmers often forget that their abstract reasoning skills have to be significantly above average). Their next question is almost bound to be "which way?".

Maybe "observation wallet" would be even better, as using the verb form is a little more indicative, as any potential Tarzan may feel the need to ask "who's the observer here?". Or maybe I'm splitting hairs! The majority will decide what sticks in the end, so there's always that fail-safe (let's just hope the majority don't ever settle on something hideously clunky)