Three days into 2012 and the MultiBit team has already knocked off part of number four on our Top 10 Most Anticipated Bitcoin Projects for 2012!
After upgrading to the 0.3.0-SNAPSHOT version of MultiBit, which happens to be my favourite lightweight client, clicking on Bitcoin links which follow the correct URI Scheme formatting will automatically launch MultiBit and create a new transaction. All that's left for you to do is click "send!"
If you've already got it installed, you can click my tip jar's QR code to see it in action.
Hey PayPal, getting nervous yet?
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I should hope the "only thing left to do is press send" part is an exaggeration. I wouldn't want anyone to be able to dump my bank account off a website that easily.
ReplyDeleteI will definitely keep the majority of my bitcoins stashed away safely (possibly on a separate computer) and only keep a few btc in these types of clients.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is a useful feature and will help bitcoin payments. I would love to see Satoshi client also doing this.
ReplyDeleteMultiBit is using the standard URI scheme. There's no reason why the Satoshi client can't implement it in the next version.
ReplyDeleteI thought .5 qt client supported URI... it's just a matter of registering the bitcoin: protocol with the browser. Am I wrong?
ReplyDeleteA link to the MultiBit.org web site: http://multibit.org
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure the Android Wallet from Andreas Schildbach already do that.
ReplyDelete@Matthew N Wright. The 'Send' button that needs to be pressed is in the MultiBit client, not in the website. The website requests the payment with the bitcoin URI but the wallets etc are not accessible from the browser.
ReplyDelete@Julian Tosh. There are a few fiddly things to get it all to work on all platforms and all browsers. For instance you sometimes get a new client instance created on the browser click when you already have one open. In this case the new instance informs the existing instance of what to do and then shuts down. I intend to write up in a Google doc what we ending up having to do to save the other bitcoin client developers their time if they want to implement it.
@dunand - Yes - Andreas's Android client does this already. AFAIK there is no other client doing this on Win/ Mac / Linux yet.
RE: support in the Satoshi client:
ReplyDeletehttps://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/593 is being tested, but assuming there is a consensus it is "safe enough" it is likely to be in the 0.6 release.
Thanks for the article, Jim and I spent a fair amount of time over Christmas getting this to work.
ReplyDeleteAnyone interested in the technical details of how MultiBit gets the protocol handlers working across platforms might benefit from this Stack Overflow answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8679698/396747
It points back to the appropriate source code locations within MultiBit so that anyone doing a similar implementation can pretty much get something working straightaway.
@Jim618 That much is obvious. I believe you didn't address my point though, at all. If all it takes to send 1000 BTC to an address is accidentally clicking okay on the program as well, that's way too little security.
ReplyDelete