Offline account and app management

[okipol88]

Ledger Live Version

• Ledger Live 1.2.6

Part of the application to improve

Creating accounts would be better done offline. The installed apps should also be available as a standalone package with a fatter installer. Currently the procedure from initialization to using the ledger requires internet connectivity for the setup. Or am I missing something?

[danuker]

Indeed, the procedure does require an internet connection. A bit too "live" for my taste as well.

I dug through the internal workings, and found that Ledger Live forwards Smart Card APDUs ("application protocol data units") from the Ledger API server to install or uninstall wallet apps.

I am slowly working on modifying Ledger Live to disable this, and instead hopefully finding a way of generating my own APDUs based on the open-source implementations of the apps (and I am curious if they match the ones from the "official" channel).

I would love it if Ledger gave us a way of doing this in a truly distributed/offline fashion - currently, if Ledger were to be forced by some [inter]government entity to distribute somehow-compromised apps, we would all get those apps.

Until I can get offline updates, I won't put my money on my newly-bought Ledger Nano S. If I am unable to do this, I will return it.

Edit: In addition, it's a pain to wait 10 seconds for the server.

[gre]

The only problem I see is that you can't do it offline, not in the current paradigm we have taken which is to use BIP44 spec and to offer the simplest experience for the user (not having to chose from a list of derivation like MEW is doing).

BIP44 tells us that you must guarantee that you can't create an account N+1 if account N is empty (you don't leave holes, that allows to not have to scan infinitely to know where are your funds)

More generally Ledger Live idea is to be "Live" and is not really designed for offline, you might need another solution for different usage.

The second discussion @danuker raised is different, it's on the genuinecheck/manager/apps feature, it's an interesting discussion that need to continue on our Slack Devs if possible because i think it's beyond Ledger Live.

[okipol88]

@gre So why not create an N = 0 account offline only. For those who seek more acounts then give the possibility to create more (N + 1) accounts in online "live" mode. This also conforms as no hole will be possible.

[gre]

You can't really create an account offline: you will not know how much it have, we will not know what is the latest address that didn't receive funds yet to preserve a bit bitcoin's privacy and to not re-use addresses ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse ). When you do Receive for bitcoin and alts, we will only propose such new address (internally we call them "freshAddress").
So ultimately that means we could only create you an account that you can't Send from, you can't Receive from, you see no operations, you don't see how much you have,..