Topic: Will the free open source Armory wallet continue to be developed going forward? (Read 8486 times)

Good news. Thank you!

It has to be, at least to identify received locked outputs. At that point adding support for CLTV spends is trivial.


Not hard per se. GUI modifications are always a pain though.

Hey goatpig what about BIP65 support/UI? Is that on the to-do list? Is it hard to do it?

A product can be source-available, without being under a FOSS license.  This allows the community to review (without the need for an NDA) but only to run under a restrictive license (or possibly not legally to run at all without paying a fee).  Of course, not everyone will respect the license, but you have recourse to the courts if someone builds a business on your software illegally.  Recourse to the courts does rely on you finding out that the business is illegally using Armory, of course.  It's not perfect, but broadly speaking big financial institutions are likely to care about compliance.

Another compromise would be a closed source online component with an open source offline signer.  That's not perfect, either, but at least it gives a high degree of assurance for cold storage applications - which I presume are the main draw of Armory.  It's still far from ideal, though, since there's a very real risk that the government could require ATI to put a backdoor into the code.  Even though I'm not doing anything that would make me a target for government action, the very presence of such a backdoor would still increase the attack surface of my online system.

It's true that most [Armory] users won't check the source themselves.
I, for one, don't, and it would be close to the same if a) the software is open source or b) I know smart and trustworthy people have the source and check it, and provide the hash of a deterministic build which matches my closed-source binary.

The interesting point now is, who is a "smart and trustworthy" person? And how many independent ones would I need to be satisfied?
And, on the other hand, how many of them are looking at the open-source code right now? More? Fewer?

One thing is for sure, for me: a periodic clearnet connection from my wallet to a centralized server is a no-go. No matter what for, no matter where to.

Ente

That's the consultant angle. Companies seeking to insure their coins need to implement a secure stack the insurance company has approved of, and reviewed/certified by specialists (i.e. us). That's at least a couple layers on top of the blockchain. Eventually there will be enough business in the bitcoin space, and enough top layer applications, to create enough demand for this model to become sustainable.


Licensing contracts make sense in business to business transactions, not so much at the retail level. The reality is that our product is aimed a few high end users, whereas the mass of consumers want a convenient payment vector. Not our target demographic. We have a better shot at existing a layer beneath, providing security the Circles of the world.


If etotheipi quits, I would replace him in his capacity. Since he has no intention to let it die, I have no reason to take over.


Faster, smaller DB. Lots of bug fixes, better handling of Core's header first. Some internal changes to prepare for litenode.

Sorry I meant he needs an income stream is obvious, not open source or not. I hope everything works out and I'm curious to find out the story sometime.

Does anyone know what's new in 0.94 but not being released yet?

If that scheme could survive the loss of it's online product authorisation service, then ok. But if the software depends on a network that isn't Bitcoin before access can be permitted, and the authorisation network is down for whatever reason, than the approach is too inflexible and too vulnerable to disaster/attack/legacy status.


That's not obvious at all. etotheipi simply hasn't made any public statements regarding this issue, so whatever his private plans may or may not have been in the past, a final decision still doesn't appear to have been made.

There's a considerable backstory to all this, and it seems to me it will eventually be made public. Not my place to speak about it right now though.

What if they sell a hash of the file? I'd pay to get a signed hash using my public key to verify my software. Also drm works great online, so my software will send my hash to download updates automatically and verify them. Hold back a public hash.

Binaries are closed source anyway, so you can sell the binary, hash plus auto update while staying open source. Getting an armory binary off torrent would be a dumb way to get a virus. People capable of making binaries can respect that even though it's open source, it's not a free license. But can build to compare against paid binary.

Yes free open source would be nice, but obviously ethiopia doesn't agree and if he quits then what? Armory is the only desktop wallet I would ever use.

Not quite. You can sell digital data, you just have to accept that there's only ever one "copy" for sale. Adjust the price accordingly.

And that something else is expertise.  The "know-how", the (long-term) experience, that you can sell to those (generally businesses) that need bitcoin & wallet-related consulting services.

If I'd be a company needing to handle, deal with, store, secure & distribute bitcoins (e.g. a large or even a mid-size company accepting bitcoins), I would be happy to by for such services.  Actually, I would _need_ those services.
Handling money or anything of value costs something, that's just a fact.  Saving tens of thousands in credit card & banking fees, I would surely spend some of that on consulting & security services to be sure that I have good systems that use and store bitcoins.

Being a developer of Armory, or being the company behind it is, I think, an incredible visit card for proposing such services.

They went wrong because once the product became data, then it became a commodity whose price naturally wanted to collapse to the marginal cost of production (for data, very very low).

There will always be a market for entertainers to produce live performances and bespoke works, and that market doesn't require DRM because the product is intrinsically uncopyable.

Likewise, source code is just data. You can't really sell source code. You have to find something else, something intrinsically uncopyable, and sell that instead.

There are ways to distribute a closed source that's pseudo community reviewed: get a few key community members to sign a NDA, deliver them the code, reproducibly build the software and have every member sign the hash. This scenario is suboptimal on both ends though. Users don't want sign a NDA and the business doesn't want to expose the source to that many individuals, NDA or not.

Bitcoin is an open source market. You have no business developing core functionalities like wallets if you're not prepared to reveal the source and be scrutinized. Closed source and DRMs are old models, mostly created and maintained by the entertainment industry (for poor results). Trying to force that on the Bitcoin market is just a recipe for failure. The revenue model should adapt to the environment, the opposite approach is silly at best.

I'm no business man. I think the crowd funding model is a reasonable way forward for any long term FOSS project, but I can't fathom what a sustained revenue model would be like. I do think we do not yet have enough applications on top of Bitcoin to design such model. It's very possible some top layer app will "rule them all" and bring closure to the business cycle. Maybe Armory coupled with a hardware signer and a high level of customization could become the stack of choice to run Lightning payment channels in the future. Maybe the future of streaming will be proof of payments on some sidechain and decentralized distribution on top of namecoin. Time will tell.

One thing is certain, Bitcoin's business cycle is very long, and some people jumping into this market are too quick to dismiss this parameter.

Armory actually started as a crowd fund back in the day. I thought ethiopa would never deliver soo much. Thanks!

Ente's idea above sounds good.

goatpig and myself have independently come to the conclusion that a form of crowdfunding is a possible way to fund continuing software development under open source licensing.

So, I think there are alot of better options than some kind of signed/DRM closed source model. That's near enough the worst option to me; having published code (and better yet, re-producible builds) are the best way to implement software that manages something this crucial.

Afaik drm is the only way to do paid licenses. Not root kit shit but closed source requiring a license key.

Any time you think drm is the solution to your problem, you're solving the wrong problem.

A hardware-bundle might be an option. Like, a full-fledged Armory hardwarewallet. Armory only works with the hardware, you pay once for the set, and the software (or better yet both) are open source.
Everything else can be patched/forked out, if the code is open source.

Ente

If there was only a way to do drm with open source

It's true, and I am also abundantly aware that all Armory users are currently enjoying the largesse of bitcointalk member sunnankar & friends when it comes to funding this work properly. Huge gratitude towards Trace & others.

On the other hand, I can't share any enthusiasm for a possible closed-source product either; I'm not the only one, and there are sound reasons to distrust proprietary software, especially for cryptocurrency (and really for any software).