Recommend Bitcoin Wallet to non-technical people

[schildbach]

No description provided.

[saivann]

Is "and available for Android" correct is English? Or should it be "and is available for Android"

[schildbach]

True enough. I changed that to two sentences.

[schildbach]

Ping. Anything else needed for merging this?

[luke-jr]

I'm not sure this is a good idea until it's actually a good idea for non-technical people to use it. Eg, at least get rid of the "from" address nonsense (it's my understanding this is planned).

[saivann]

I think that luke-jr talks about issue 49: https://code.google.com/p/bitcoin-wallet/issues/detail?id=49

@schildbach : This issue seemed easy to fix at a first glance, do you think you can take a look at it?

I agree with luke-jr that in general, "from" addresses don't make sense in a context where the general consensus is not to reuse addresses. Also in some cases, users could lose funds if they send it back to (one of) the input addresses, if they assume these addresses belong to someone in particular, which might often not be the case.

Note: Not sure this should be a stopper for merging this one, since we already recommend BW4A as the default option in "Get started fast and easy" and BW4A indeed seems to be the best mobile wallet option so far.

[schildbach]

I agree with you both. The issue with silently creating new addresses (and thus being able to distinguish payments if not by from address) is that the backup problem is not solved. I plan to move away from re-using addresses at the same time we migrate to BIP32 HD wallets.

[saivann]

(Correct me if I'm wrong)

My understanding of issue 49 is that it could be fixed with or without HD wallets (which could take time to be implemented). It is a simple GUI fix to display "received with" address instead of "received from" address. BW4A already allows users to manually create different addresses so this feature would allow them to see with which address they receive a payment (and encourage users to use new addresses for new payments). I suppose that this would work fine to distinguish payments (with the date, the amount paid and the "received with" address).

Edit: BW4A seems to allow to make a backup all private keys of all addresses it contains.

[schildbach]

Currently, you're required to back up the wallet each time after you added a key -- that's just not practical. BIP32 will take care of that by only needing to backup once. One backup covers all keys created in future.

[saivann]

Fair enough, this indeed probably isn't a good short-term solution if this leads to more private keys with no backup.

I will merge the pull req later today.

[luke-jr]

Even without HD wallets, you could easily do a keypool like Bitcoin-Qt does.