Thom, Thanks for the thoughtful and informative reply.

I’ve been following and investing in Bitshares for a couple of years now. I like the great ideas and the great development team and the tremendous potential and have been gradually accumulating BTS.  I realize that the developers work very hard for very little and I am hesitant to complain. However I am really frustrated by the Windows client installation procedure, and I doubt I am the only one, and I can’t help but think these problems are having a big negative effect on Bitshares adoption.  I cringe whenever there is a mandatory upgrade because I know it won’t go smoothly and will inevitably result in me having to download the blockchain yet again thus taking up a lot of time and using up a big portion of my monthly download allowance (I have a satellite connection with monthly download limits).

Bitshares has lots of great features and there are great ideas to enhance it even further. But without a functioning wallet, I can’t really use them. It does not matter how many great features you have, if updating the client is so painful, not very many people are going to go to the trouble.

Bitshares is beset with a number of problems and they’ve been talked about before on this forum as well as elsewhere, but IMO, far and away the number one problem with Bitshares and it isn’t close, is the lack of a stable wallet software. This needs to be fixed BEFORE focusing on increased adoption. In spite of all of the great features, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else until there is stable wallet software, and at this point I’m skeptical about whether such a wallet will ever actually exist.

I am currently running 9.1. Apparently there is now a 9.2 that is only required for delegates. I’m not a delegate, but in any event my software no longer syncs.  I’m not a software expert, but I have installed lots of software over the years and never encountered the problems that I have encountered with Bitshares. I’m pretty sure that if I wanted to spend a few hours or days fighting with it and use up a lot of my monthly download allowance then I could eventually get it working and synched. But it’s just not worth it to me anymore.

I am using Windows and I get that technically inclined users think that the Windows operating system is crap, but it’s what I know and am comfortable with. And it’s what a lot of other people use also, and we’re not going to switch operating systems just so we can use Bitshares.

I get that making a robust wallet that works across multiple operating systems is hard. But other crypto-currencies have done it. I have been updating my full node software for the bitcoin core wallet for several years now and upgrading has always gone flawlessly. Yeah, I know bitcoin has a much bigger user base and more developers who contribute to it, but I also own several other alt-coins and have not experienced anywhere near the frustration installing and updating the alt-clients that I have had with Bitshares.

I won’t bother going through the litany of problems I’ve experienced with software upgrades over the past year or so. Some of them are already documented in prior posts but there are many more that I’ve managed to (painfully) work through myself and have never posted about. Users try to help, but it’s just a frustrating time-consuming experience all around. There really needs to be an easy-to-find set of installation instructions with trouble-shooting procedures if something goes wrong, but unfortunately the software is so unstable I don’t think that’s possible.

I don’t have the technical skills to actually fix any of these problems but if I were convinced that there was a serious effort to solve these problems, I would probably be willing to do some beta testing and report on bugs and try different solutions but that’s about the extent of my ability.

Since we are using DPOS, it is less important for me to run a full node so a reliable SPV or web-based wallet would be fine for me as long as I maintained control over my own shares.

For now I’m just going to sit on my BTS, but I don’t plan to buy any more nor do I plan to recommend it to anyone else unless and until the wallet problems are solved.

After installing 0.7.0  on Windows I am getting the following message:

"An error occurred while trying to start. Please try restarting application."

Regardless of how many times I restart or try again after rebooting computer, I continue to get this same message.

I have also tried renaming config.json. When I restart it creates a new config.json file but I continue to get the same error message.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

Ander,

Thank you for that very clear explanation. It is by far the best and most easily understood explanation that I have ever seen, and the whole thing makes much better sense to me now.

FWIW, I agree with gamey, that some version of this should go on the wiki.

FWIW, I am having a similar problem with Peloniex, so apparently the problem isn't just BTER. The transaction id that Peloniex has in my withdrawal history is not found in the blockchain.

I withdrew 69 PTS from Peloniex on 12/11 and my wallet still says 69 unconfirmed shares on 12/13. If these shares are not confirmed by 12/14, then I assume they will miss the snapshot and there is nothing I can do about it, right? What time on 12/14 is the snapshot effective?

I still basically cannot connect. I have been re-installing and then re-trying every time a new release of the bitshares-x software is released. I am now using the 64-bit version of 4.17, but I have also tried the 32-bit version for Windows.

Here is what get_info says:

>> get_info

{
  "blockchain_head_block_num": 0,
  "blockchain_head_block_age": null,
  "blockchain_head_block_timestamp": null,
  "blockchain_average_delegate_participation": "0.00 %",
  "blockchain_confirmation_requirement": 202,
  "blockchain_delegate_pay_rate": "0.00000 BTSX",
  "blockchain_share_supply": "1,999,999,999.81923 BTSX",
  "blockchain_blocks_left_in_round": 101,
  "blockchain_next_round_time": null,
  "blockchain_next_round_timestamp": null,
  "blockchain_random_seed": "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "client_data_dir": "C:/Users/Greg/AppData/Roaming/BITSHA~2",
  "client_version": "v0.4.17",
  "network_num_connections": 0,
  "network_num_connections_max": 200,
  "ntp_time": null,
  "ntp_time_error": null,
  "wallet_open": true,
  "wallet_unlocked": true,
  "wallet_unlocked_until": "12 days in the future",
  "wallet_unlocked_until_timestamp": "2014-10-09T17:43:35",
  "wallet_last_scanned_block_timestamp": null,
  "wallet_scan_progress": "0.00 %",
  "wallet_block_production_enabled": false,
  "wallet_next_block_production_time": null,
  "wallet_next_block_production_timestamp": null
}

I get the same result if I install the software on a different computer.

Once, after waiting 20 minutes I was able to get:  "network_num_connections": 1,
but a few minutes later it went back to:  "network_num_connections": 0,

I live in a rural area and I have a satellite internet connection which is slow by urban standards.  I am able to run most other things including a full node on the bitcoin network when I want to, so it seems like my connection would be fast enough, but I can't think of anything else. Would a somewhat slow internet connection cause this problem?