MultiBit team notifications

[jim618]

Hello All MultiBit HD Collaborators !

We've been working on adding real HD wallets in a branch called mbhd-hdw. It's looking good so we plan to merge it into the develop branch at the beginning of next week. (5th May or so).

THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE

Old wallets will no longer be opened. If you have any existing wallets: 1) Move out any bitcoin you have in them 2) Move the directory (which will be called mbhd-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah) out from your mbhd user data directory to somewhere else. If you look in the 'Tools | Edit wallet' utility it tells you exactly where your wallet is.

After this change we will be using the real HD algorithm rather than the very simple deterministic address generator we had before. This uses the work Mike Hearn has been doing in bitcoinj.

Note: we expect there will be another breaking change when we merge in another branch (issue-13) which AES encrypts all wallets, contacts, transaction history and audit history. We'll most likely do this towards the end of May. After that the file format should be stable.

Thanks for your patience.

[jim618]

Hello All,

BREAKING CHANGES has just been merged into develop.

We have revamped all the files and now have:

• Wallets are now using HD keys as provided by bitcoinj (this uses Mike's hdw-alpha branch)
• Wallets, contact database, payments database and history database are all now AES encrypted.
• Rolling backups are now the encrypted versions of the wallets
• The local and cloud backups are now AES encrypted

Apart from any bugs we've introduced or (possibly) HD wallet structural changes driven by bitcoinj we don't anticipate any more breaking changes to the file formats now.

You best strategy is: 1) Move any bitcoin out of any existing wallets you have. 2) Move all the walelts out of your MultiBit HD user data directory. 3) Update using git and start afresh.

[gary-rowe]

Hello All,

Just a note about code reviews and current resourcing. At the moment Jim has had to switch to work on other pressing matters for a few weeks leaving me to continue with the majority of the development work for a while.

If you are in a position to assist with verifying the ongoing updates I'd appreciate the help.

Issues that are marked with the yellow "awaiting review" label are ready for someone to verify. Those with the blue "in progress" indicate where we are currently working.

Typically the verification is just to run up the code and poke around the area trying to break it through the UI. Obviously deeper code review is appreciated but we're all busy people so I don't want to ask too much. If it all seems OK, just put in a "worked for me on Linux" type comment.

Thanks,

Gary and Jim

[jim618]

Hello Everybody,

Just a note that a minor breaking change has gone into the MBHD codebase this afternoon:

The format of the encrypted wallet password has changed to avoid leaking when a short wallet password is used. (Short passwords are now padded to obfuscate them).

If you do a 'restore password from seed' for the old format it won't be able to recover it.

You can either ignore this breaking change or fix it by either: 1) Changing the password in "Tools | Change password" (It will rewrite the encrypted wallet password in the new format) 2) Creating a new wallet.

More details: https://github.com/bitcoin-solutions/multibit-hd/issues/52

[gary-rowe]

Hi everyone,

Just a note on progress. I've moved a bunch of outstanding issues into a new milestone called "Private Beta 3" and renamed the existing milestone as "Private Beta 2". This is to allow us to push out a first cut of our new JWrapper based installer for review by private beta testers.

If anyone is interested in testing these installers out, please add your name to the Multibit HD Private Beta group. I'm anticipating pushing out the installer within the next 12 hours.

Jim and I feel that this private beta represents the first "use case complete" version so should be suitable for early translators to work with. Any issues arising from this release will be addressed in "Private Beta 3".

As a general heads up, when "Private Beta 3" completes the plan is to move to "Public Beta" which will be the first large scale testing of the software (3000+ users). To mark this transition we will be open-sourcing the repository and resetting the Collaborator list.

[ghost]

Hi everyone,

Jim and I have decided that now is a good time to switch this repository to fully open source. As a result you'll all get removed from the collaborator list - please don't take this as an insult :-)

MultiBit HD is released under a modified MIT licence (take the code and go, be aware that the official version charges fees to sustain development).

We plan to release the Private Beta 3 installers in a couple of days at most. We just need to update the accompanying beta version of the website and then we're good to go.

After these changes we've got Private Beta 4 (and possibly 5 given the number of issues found by the beta testers) then we're into Public Beta.

[ollekullberg]

Great that you've reached a stable version. I'm sure the users will value MBHD!