Yes, the language change (and the change of Look and Feel) can be a bit quirky but if you restart MultiBit it always get it right.
It is things being cached and then not being completely reinitialised I think but i have not pinned them all down.

Hi Grouver,

There are a combination of techniques used to get the initial startup time as quick as possible:
1) With bitcoinj based code only the block headers are stored in the blockchain. These are 100 bytes per block. So the 200,000+ blocks take about 20 MB. I include an up to date copy in the installer. This means you only have to catch up the blockchain since the date of the last installer.
2) When you first start MultiBit you do not have a wallet yet. Thus it can save time because it does not have to check old blocks to see if there any relevant transactions. It thus tells the bitcoind it is connected to: 'just give me the block headers, do not bother giving me the transactions'. This can download at 1000+ blocks a second on a good connection.

Once you have a wallet it currently downloads the full blocks to check the transactions. In the next few months I hope to get server side Bloom filters in (see conference presentation) which should speed up the downloads when you have wallets. It won't ever be as fast as the initial setup but should be a good bit quicker than now.

some feedback/questions: I just checked out multibit for the first time together with my brother (recovered some coins from an old electrum wallet and we imported a private key).

• How is the change address chosen? It seems (unlike satoshi client), multibit does not generate new addresses on it's own but uses some existing address for change. Why is that? I'm assuming to solve the "wallet backup problem"?
  
  
• It seems funds are unspendable until the previous tx is in a block. Why? (this could be pretty annoying, say in case I want to send money to multiple different recipients. I would have to wait for a block in between each transaction)
  
  
• A suggestion regarding key import: I expected to be able to import a private key by pasting it into some textentry field. Instead we had to generate a file (we used key export to see what the format was). We didn't know what to use for the date and so we used todays date. As we later discovered this was a mistake, we should've entered the date the last tx on that address had taken place (we did a blockchain rescan afterwards to fix it). So the suggestion: in addition to being able to import keys from file, maybe a textbox to paste a private key could be offered. After that, a popup or something could ask for the rescan-timepoint and explain what it is about)
  
  
• A sort-of bug (likely not multibit fault, probably not even fixable from multibit source): My brother uses a window manager called "notion" (formerly "ion"). At times something gets screwed up and menus (both when selecting from main menu and also the context menu when using right-click on, for example, a transaction) appear offset to the lower right (by many pixels, somewhere completely else in the window) and menu items cannot be selected with the mouse. Once it starts occuring it keeps occuring with the same offset. A frame-resize doesn't help, but putting multibit into another frame (re-attach) does. This might not be worth investigating since it's most likely notions fault, just thought I'd let you know anyway.
  
  

Other than that our experience has been satisfying. Thanks for a great open product!

(I'm the lead developer for MultiBit Merchant)

As part of my October of Bitcoin I'll be pushing MultiBit Merchant to a minimum viable product (MVP). This means that I have to strip out as much extraneous work as possible to hit that tight deadline. The MVP is unlikely to have automated fiat exchange in place, although prices will be quoted in real time from MtGox in a range of local currencies.

However, I am also involved with the XChange project and as part of that there is a push to introduce a Deposit/Withdraw API in addition to the trading API. Using XChange it should be possible to take bitcoins, deposit them onto the exchange offering the best deal at your market depth (arbitrage) and perform a trade to fiat. That fiat can then be withdrawn to your selected account using the exchange's provided mechanisms.

XChange is a Java library, but because it runs on the JVM (now known as the mlvm) it is possible for it to be accessed by any other language running on the technology (think Clojure, Jython, JRuby etc). In time, this will make it trivial for anyone using the mlvm to be able to interoperate with a wide range of exchanges.

I've joined too! I think it's an excellent initiative.

Great initiative this foundation, but i was browsing the site and i see that there are different classes of membership, and different costs. The site says that: "Each Membership includes one vote in its voting class. " but does one class have more weight than another class ? so if i donate 10000 bitcoins per year as a company do i have more to say in this foundation ?

i posted this question also on the official thread....

Hi bitcoinspot.nl,

Yes the Bitcoin Foundation is a very interesting development.

I think how the classes works is that:

+ Each class of member votes for their representative in that class.
+ One membership gets one vote.

So each of the individual members vote for their "individuals" representative, the companies vote for their "company" representative etc.


When you send bitcoin you only have to type in the password once. There is a slight delay in the send dialog updating just due to the code waiting for the network to send the bitcoin.

There are the two password entry fields when you are setting up and changing the password to help avoid a typo creating a wallet with an unexpected password.

I had a user this week report that her blockchain got corrupted when her computer lost power.
Previously at startup if MultiBit could not load the blockchain you would get a red "Error" on the network indicator at the bottom left of the screen.

How MultiBit works is that there is an up-to-date blockchain included in the installer. This is a file called multibit.blockchain. When you first use MultiBit it copies the multibit.blockchain into your user data area and then starts syncing the copy in the user data area. (This is so that multiple users can be running MultiBit on the same machine).

I have put in some error recovery code so that if the user's blockchain does not load, it recopies in the one from the installer. It will then have to re-sync from the date of your MultiBit installation so this might take a while but at least then the recovery is automatic.

I think this is one of those "1 in a thousand" failures so I expect most people will never encounter it.
It will appear in the next live and test releases.

You had to get the private keys out of my corrupted file when the same thing happened to me a few months ago (I think that was what happened, or something similar).

I see. Well good to know you countered the bug.