Saturday, May 24, 2014

Dark Wallet Update

The better anonymous angel of BTC nature responded again to my bleg, upping my BTC-E balance to a total of 0.0102 BTC. So even though I had pretty much called the whole idea off for lack of funds, I figure I owe it to said angel to go ahead and test Dark Wallet instead.


  1. I transferred my BTC-E balance to my Dark Wallet.
  2. The balance after BTC-E withdrawal fees arrived in my Dark Wallet immediately, marked "unconfirmed" and therefore not spendable.
  3. Within a couple of minutes, Dark Wallet stopped displaying "unconfirmed," which presumably means that some threshold of block chain confirmations was met (blockchain.info reported two confirmations).
  4. The 0.0102 total that I started with came from three addresses. I had 0.0092 BTC remaining by the time it got to my Dark Wallet, so I decided to send 0.009 BTC back to the address that made the largest contribution (0.01 BTC).
  5. Dark Wallet reported for about a minute that it was "mixing" -- this, as I understand it is Dark Wallet's "money laundering" function to obfuscate the origins of Bitcoin transfers -- then reported that it was "sending with no mixing" (this may be related to me clicking on the "mixing" notification).
  6. Blockchain.info reported the transfer as complete, with one confirmation, almost immediately.
What does all this tell me? Not a lot, but at least one thing I needed to know: This alpha release of Dark Wallet does in fact work as a Bitcoin wallet and in/out transfer system. It should be obvious that that is one of the non-negotiable specs.

I wish that the "mixing" had happened so that I could comment on its obfuscation functions, and later on when I have some of my own BTC to mess with instead of having to ask others to donate, I'll experiment with that some more.

I'd much appreciate comments from knowledgeable people on the security/privacy aspects of the thing -- whether or not what's there works and works effectively or not -- to the extent that those things can be evaluated form both a use and code analysis standpoint.

For obvious reasons I am not expecting an alpha product to be perfect, but Dark Wallet does look very promising to me. If I'm wrong and anyone out there knows it, please tell me and tell me why. And thanks to the angel or angels for the "messing around with it" coinage!

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