Multibit is Deprecated - Do Not Use

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Dear Bitcoin Community,

It is time for us to let Multibit go.

KeepKey acquired Multibit a little over 1 year ago. At the time, the engineers who originally built and supported Multibit had announced that they would no longer be working on it or providing support. Multibit played an important role in the Bitcoin infrastructure. We felt that it was important for Multibit to continue and hoped that with our existing support and development teams, we would be able to keep Multibit alive.

The reality is that Multibit is in need of a lot of work. It has stubborn bugs that have caused us and Multibit users much grief. Additionally, Bitcoin has gone through a fundamental change in regards to the way fees work. The addition of SegWit in the coming weeks will mean the Multibit software has fallen still further behind.

Unfortunately, KeepKey simply does not have the resources to support the current issues, nor to rebuild Multibit to ensure ideal user experience. By focusing our attention on the KeepKey device, we will continue building and improving the best hardware wallet available.

Thus, KeepKey will discontinue support and maintenance of Multibit, effective immediately.

We recommend that all Multibit users discontinue using it and you move your keys to other wallet software of your choosing.

Next Steps for Multibit Users

Videos that demonstrate how to move your wallet to Electrum are available on YouTube.

• Multibit HD: https://youtu.be/E-KcY6KUVnY
• Multibit Classic: https://youtu.be/LaijbTcxsv8

Please note that the version of Electrum available for download today (version 2.8.3) doesn’t fully support the importing Multibit HD wallet words. The version shown in the Multibit HD video is the soon-to-be-released next version.

Multibit was a fantastic piece of software in its time, and we want to thank the Multibit developers for such an important contribution to Bitcoin’s history.

Sincerely,

Ken Heutmaker

CTO, KeepKey

Introduction

MultiBit is a Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) Bitcoin desktop client.

MultiBit is now in maintenance mode as it has largely been replaced by MultiBit HD. To avoid confusion we refer to MultiBit Classic and MultiBit HD to keep them separate.

MultiBit Classic relies on the following technologies:

• Maven as the build system, so the usual Maven processes apply. If you're not familiar with Maven then download it first and follow their installation instructions.
• ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") for QR codes
• Bitcoinj for access to the Bitcoin network
• Install4j for creating installers for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Bitcoinj Enforcer Rules to prevent dependency chain attacks
• XChange for access to several Bitcoin exchanges

The Bitcoinj "Alice" dependency

MultiBit Classic depends on a special fork of Bitcoinj for its Bitcoin support. This is due to legacy wallet serialization issues and the MultiBit team are working towards a complete integration through the MultiBit HD project.

While it is possible to build MultiBit Classic using our staging repository you may want to review the modified Bitcoinj library for yourself. You can clone from this fork:

https://code.google.com/r/jimburton618-bitcoinj-coinbase-tx/source/checkout

The branch you should use for the MultiBit master code is: bcj-0.11.2-mb-alice The branch you should use for the MultiBit develop code is: bcj-0.11.2-mb-alice

Once cloned, you should then install the custom Bitcoinj library using

mvn clean install

Branching strategy

This loosely follows the "master-develop" or "Git flow" pattern.

There are 2 main branches: master and develop. The master branch is exclusively for releases, while the develop is exclusively for release candidates. The develop branch always has a Maven version of develop-SNAPSHOT.

Occasionally a feature branch will be made off develop to cover a long-running issue. This will then be merged back into develop

When develop is ready for release it is subjected to extensive testing (manual and automated). The final act is to update the pom.xml to remove the SNAPSHOT suffix and merge it into master.

The master branch is then tagged with the release number. Tags are in the format v1.2.3 to distinguish them from branch names.

An announcement is made on the MultiBit website and social media (Twitter, Reddit, Bitcointalk etc) to alert everyone that a new version is available.

Maven build targets

The important targets are:

mvn clean install

After some processing, you will have the following artifacts in the target directory:

• an executable jar: multibit-exe.jar

Bitcoin Solutions staff

Use the Install4j installer in the multibit-installers project to create your Mac/ Win/ Linux installers.

To run MultiBit from these artifacts you can follow the instructions provided on the main MultiBit website

Custom configuration

MultiBit Classic is quite flexible and has several features only accessible to power users through the configuration file. This is discussed in more detail in configuration.md

Contributing

All contributors must be OK with releasing their work under the MIT license.