I'm working on something like that, for iPhone, but not really for generating, more for spending.. the problem is it's really hard to type in a bitcoin address on that little thing.

nice!

Another option is an mobile-optimized, https-secured web interface on your local computer. That's already possible with something like LigHTTPd and PHP or Python and JSON-RPC. Not quite as good as running Bitcoin on your phone, but better than vekja.net for trustworthiness.

Sure, but Apple would likely not accept it.

It could be useful for many things because your phone is usually carried everywhere unlike a desktop/laptop.
I imagine it would be able to carry your wallet db
Phone banking of some description.
A list of bitcoin sites you could browse.
A push notification for bitcoins received/sent.
Exchange on the go.

If you had an untraceable el cheapo burner phone you might need to purchase
prepaid phone cards using bitcoin- for the paranoid lol


I guess the list would grow as the marketplace expanded and more merchants came on board.

I think that's the best option right now.  Like cash, you don't keep your entire net worth in your pocket, just walking around money for incidental expenses.

They could make a smaller version of the site optimized for mobile.  If there was an app, it could be a front end to one of those, with the main feature being QR-code reader, or maybe there's already a universal QR-code reading app that web sites can be designed to accept scans from.

If there was an iPhone app that was just a front end for vekja or mybitcoin, not a big involved P2P, would apple approve it and if not, on what basis?  It could always be an Android app instead.  An app is not really necessary though, just a mobile sized website.

A web interface to your own Bitcoin server at home wouldn't be a solution for everyone.  Most users don't have a static IP, and it's too much trouble to set up port forwarding.

This was my first though too, it would be nice if someone was able to do this for the android as well, especially when it should be very easy for the QR integration with the zxing library.

I dislike the idea of using a third party site myself, at least at the moment. I would much rather carry around a wallet on my mobile device.

A mobile client would really be a great bump to bitcoin overall, been able to go to large group events (LUG event, Con's etc) where there may be opportunity to make real world transactions in front of people who might otherwise be unaware of bitcoin, especially if they could download a app there and then and get involved.

For what I have seen everybody agrees that a full bitcoin server for mobiles is not the way to go, since it would be draining the battery with the processing (even if its not generating coins). Also, the mobile internet connection is expensive in a lot of places and is payed by how much information you transmit.

So the obvious solution is a frontend to a bitcoin server. I think limiting the frontend to a bitcoin web service is bad because you are loosing the de-centralized nature of bitcoin. This has the problem typical problems of centralization, but also its worth noting that governments arround the world impose a monopoly on money in their territory and bitcoin is going to compite against it. So giving a central location or company to attack is making things easier for governments to attack bitcoin and defend their money monopoly. Also, a lot of us run our home servers with bitcoin and it would be great if the phone can directly connect to our servers.

I am thinking the easiest and most practical solution would be a frontend that connects to the server through a encrypted, password protected, json-rpc connection. That way the frontend could be configured to connect to both a private server in the home or to a bitcoin webservice. This would require also changes in the server to allow those kind of connections obviously.

PS: Adding the scanning feature to be able to pay automatically is the perfect extra.

Or the region that starts using bitcoin can use something like this: http://guifi.net

I'd like to draw your attention to

http://bt.irlbtc.com/view/505.0

in which I outline a scheme which allows a mobile phone to set up as a full bitcoin server with the smallest possible amount of network traffic and computation. Setting up could be made so fast that you'd essentially set up the hash block state from new every time you wanted to check a balance or make a transaction. After you'd done what you wanted to do, you'd delete all the data again.

ByteCoin