That's the plan!

We're planning to release a beta of the LW on BitShares. Are there any critical issues in the light wallet that have been found which need to be fixed prior to releasing on the live BitShares network?

Since all of this information is recorded in the blockchain and associated to the active key of the light wallet accounts, why can't the light wallet client simply query the light wallet server to give it all the raw transactions from the blockchain that are associated with its public active key? Then the light wallet could reconstruct the transaction history even if didn't store it locally.

That's exactly what it does, although it caches things based on time, so I'm guessing your cache got damaged in the crash. Right now I'm just using FC to do persistence, but I think I need something a little more capable. I'll look into this. To clarify, the light wallet always reports your balance correctly, but not always your history? It's designed to be a bit more careful about reporting the balance correctly, so I'm glad that's working as intended.

I am curious about that crash, though. I haven't seen any crashes except crashes on exit. I don't suppose you collected the command line output around said crash, or maybe even a backtrace, did you? :]

@fluxer: I agree with you, and I'd like to see such solutions deployed. The issues aren't insurmountable, but they need consideration, and I welcome new ideas on how to solve them (why waste time implementing one bad solution if someone else can think of a better one?). Right now I'm the only one running a light server because it's under heavy development (you think delegates have to upgrade a lot? Ha!) and I need to be able to debug and redeploy rapidly. Once I've got a relatively stable solution (which is, of course, the point of this beta -- to figure out what needs to be changed to sustain a reliable solution) then I'll be looking into multi-server models. Eventually, I'll make it configurable.

Still, the model of paying a centralized party to provide immediate, accurate information is a reasonable one, particularly when I deploy mobile apps where all matters of internet traffic are much more expensive (in time and money).

@cn-members: Thank you very much for taking the time to detail out those instructions. I'll add those to a README on GitHub soon.

@arhag: I'm glad you got it working! Yes, I do develop against 5.4. I think 5.3 would work, but you'll have to turn back the version numbers in the import statements until it works, and doing that might break something which depends on the later version. I haven't researched exactly when all the features I need were added, so I just use the latest version available at the time of writing.


Is anyone else still having trouble building? For the rest of you, do you have any comments or problems you've experienced?

For the windows users, I'm hoping to get my hands on a windows dev box tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get something together for you. Thanks for being patient!

Yeah, for some reason it's still pointing at localhost. I thought I fixed that. Anyways, just change "localhost" to "nathanhourt.com" and you'll be set.

Xeroc: You're using papyros's copy of qml-material, not my fork. Make sure to get qml-material from github.com/nathanhourt/qml-material and to use the develop branch. Edit: scratch that, you've got an old version of the light wallet. Are you sure you're building on the devshares branch?

Arhag: Your version of Qt is older than the lightwallet expects. You can update Qt, or you can try modifying the wallet to use an older version of Qt by turning down the version number in the qml files (change `import QtQuick 2.4` to 2.3 or lower)

Update for the Ubuntu users: I can't get qml-extras and qml-material to build their tests. My best guess is that the old version of Qt that ships with Ubuntu just can't handle it. As a workaround, disable the tests by editing qml-extras.pro and qml-material.pro and removing the references to the tests subdir. Then you can just `sudo make install` and it should work.

Oh, and remember to use my fork of qml-material at github.com/nathanhourt/qml-material -- I've made some changes that haven't been merged upstream.

Hello, all!

It's finally time to publish an open beta for my light wallet, currently available for DevShares. For those who want to skip the intro and get straight to the download, a Mac binary is available here:
http://ge.tt/1eflUa92/v/0
http://ge.tt/9uSSL0A2/v/0 Update! Just ignore the error about assets at startup.
http://ge.tt/1eDoNAA2/v/0 Should fix the junk characters in the brain key
Windows binaries will hopefully be available at some point. I would post build instructions, but we need to merge everything necessary into the official DevShares release first.

The usual disclaimers. This is beta software. It has bugs. It sometimes crashes on exit. It might lose your money, it might start thermonuclear war, and it might eat your lunch. Use it at your own risk. I'm happy to support it, but I'm not liable for anything it does. Also, the source code is available in the programs/light_wallet folder on the BitShares code repository, though this particular binary is built using a custom merge of the develop and devshares branches which is not published anywhere, as some of the features it requires have not yet been tagged into a devshares release. It does not have any code which is not available on one of those two branches, though.

This wallet is a light wallet; it uses my server at nathanhourt.com to query the blockchain and also to register accounts. The light wallet manages your private keys, and never sends them to anyone else, as you would expect. It also creates its transactions locally, then scans them and confirms them with the user before signing and submitting to my server for broadcast. This way, I give the user reasonable certainty that a bug in the code will not cause them to sign an unintended transaction.

At present, the wallet only allows one account to be created, and it requires that the account be registered by my server. It does not support BitShares Logins or other BTS URLs. Future versions will allow more options, but I want to keep it as simple as possible for the beta test, so that I can fix bugs in the code now, as this will be the platform upon which all future features are built. I also want to get it out there in hopes that it can be useful to people sooner rather than later, and I can prioritize further development based on feedback.

Finally, I note that the full-node web/qt wallet currently has a bug which prevents it from displaying transactions from my light wallet in the history. This is purely a history display bug; the full wallet does include the received funds in your balance and can spend them. I also note that at present, our extended memos are buggy and memos longer than 19 bytes are not displayed correctly.

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think, and vote for dev.nathanhourt.com