Wallet and first Mist Beta 0.8.0

This is a small release of the Ethereum Wallet, but a big step for Mist development as it's our first* public release of the Mist browser. This is the same software we've been shipping for some time now (in fact you can launch mist from the wallet using a command line flag) but we believed this would be a good time to make it available in an easier form for the general public to test and developers to start tinkering with it's possibilities.

* You can say we started at zero

Why?

The Ethereum Foundation believes in a more decentralised internet, one where users keep their private information and where applications can run without any centralised server, using smart contracts as their logic. The Ethereum Wallet has some basic contract functionality, but we believe that in order for smart contracts to reach their full potential, they should be as easy to use as website.

So the "Mist Navigator" is not meant to be a better general browser, but a starting point to access future Ethereum Applications, and this is where we will be building more functionality that goes beyond the blockchain, like decentralised file storage and p2p communication layers.

The Wallet

We are making both the traditional wallet app and the Mist Navigator. The former option includes the the wallet as a default app and you can use it in the exact same way as before. Unlike the Ethereum Wallet application which hosts all the files locally, this version is hosted at wallet.ethereum.org, a mirror of this github repository which is derived directly from the linked source code on github. These files contain only the interface files and no information is stored at any server. The only external connection is made to a price information server. All your private information is stored locally on your own computer and the connection to the blockchain is done via Mist. As soon as Swarm is deployed on the main net we will start distributing it this way so it will become again a local file.

How to use the Browser

We built an example application for you to interact with (we will cover more about how it works behind the scenes on a future blog post). Use Mist to navigate to that page - it will not work on a normal browser as it keeps all information on the blockchain and not in any one server.

Click Browse, paste the address https://ethereum.github.io/stake-voice/ on it and press enter.

Stake Voice is a generic polling app, intended to be able to give Ether Stake holders an opinion on any controversial topic. It doesn't keep any ether, and all it does is verifies that a key holder indeed agrees or disagrees with that statement. The votes and balances are then tallied by the app itself and the tally is updated if any of the currently voting accounts change their balance.

The first thing you need to do is allow the app to see one of your accounts. Instead of each site having to create separate login procedures and keeping your private information, you start all mist apps anonymously and then you reveal your credentials with a few clicks. Click on the "no accounts set" to connect to the app, and optionally click the plus button to add it to your sidebar (we are in the process of streamlining these steps).

Now type a statement on the text box, anything you want to know either people agree or disagree with.

If you just typed the question, chances are that nobody answered it yet. So click one of the buttons, agree or disagree and a window will pop up and ask your password.

Don't type your password blindly. This window means that you are about to execute a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Check if it's sending any ether and before you confirm it and use an online tool to verify the contract source.

You can verify the source of the contracts you are interacting here and here. Also notice the icons on that page and check if they are identical to the ones you are seeing on the confirmation page. The icons of the latest version of the contract should look like this:

We are working on making all these steps more user friendly in the future. Meanwhile we recommend you create a new account with no tokens to interact with unknown contracts and refuse to interact with any contract whose source code is unknown.

Contract icon looks the same? Check. Ether sent is set at 0? Check.

After you confirmed your password, wait for the next block to be picked up and in a few seconds the app will calculate everyone's current opinion on the matter. Share the link with friends to get them to answer the issues too.

The app stores no information on servers, so all information is saved on the blockchain and the statement is kept at the url, but since all information is public anyone can extend the app, by adding comments, lists of most voted statements and create their own interface for it. We will cover how the app works and how you can build similar apps like these in a future blog post.

Some random statements you can try: Game of Thrones vs Star Wars and Nutella

This is a proof of concept code and is not intended to scale. While it can accurately depict stake holders opinions, since all calculation is done on the frontend, some very popular or controversial questions could be attacked by spammers that create thousands of dust votes. If you want to check other projects doing similar things but with the specific purpose of Fork Voting, you should check ethersignal (same basic code, but with added spam protection) and carbonvote.

Known Issues

Mist Browser is in early stages and we decided to release it earlier than expected in the hopes that it can help build better discussion and governance tools for Ethereum. Some known bugs:

• Sometimes tabs will lose their titles or the main page won't load. Pressing the regresh button (command+r or control+r) on the tab will solve the issue
• A white rectangle sometimes appear at the bottom of apps. Resizing the app forces a redraw and the rectangle disappears
• Tabs are occasionally forgotten by the application

Full Changelog

• adding setting to change UI language (fixes #813) (#896)
• update-popup-window: prevent maximize (#885)
• fixed webview tagd and updated electrong to 1.2.5 (#905)
• Fixes the node start IPC connection (#841)
• Cleanup of i18n files (#910)
• Fixing wallet tab insertion (#911)
• Fully automated UI testing (#788)

Changes to Wallet

• Caches the contract code and ABI inputs (ethereum/meteor-dapp-wallet#221)

Saves contract code in memory when getting out of tab: This is particularly useful when you need the address of a contract as one of the parameters for another contract (creating a dao that uses a token for example) and you want to go to another tab to copy it (Add caching to contract ethereum/meteor-dapp-wallet#139)

• Fixes an issue that would prevent you from sending tokens out of a contract without ether
• Fixes an issue that would select an account you don’t own when sending tokens from a wallet contract
• Doesn’t allow you to deploy contracts from wallet contracts

Wallet Checksums

SHA256 Ethereum-Wallet-linux32-0-8-0.zip: e194e6d324902c9fb42003e8f38d57a4770feef3409d3c0b32651fc3c0d17ea0
SHA256 Ethereum-Wallet-linux64-0-8-0.zip: c1b29ec8ff9f622e3e67980f47db0719bb0afbd019fd98905d420342cbc6ab60
SHA256 Ethereum-Wallet-macosx-0-8-0.zip: 1ac15ff445e68b32442daa116613be24bfcf17c94f8a12ccbf4988dfcccfb82a
SHA256 Ethereum-Wallet-win32-0-8-0.zip: 9b5fbf496627086f5dc5be4ff4e5773d23af479d64871d3540bdda99f1de3e20
SHA256 Ethereum-Wallet-win64-0-8-0.zip: 2253609e97347e79a717cce28867d8f011cffb6b989b19e59c943d0f7eba4cc7

SHA256 Mist-linux32-0-8-0.zip: d5ae27fb3bc0483156c531176fe9f9fe2d6d6ab281de8c46ba9acca2178f01c4
SHA256 Mist-linux64-0-8-0.zip: 358b4fb3bd3e4c384f1c018cfc94841ddb862020d1a147780f35fb1361c6c285
SHA256 Mist-macosx-0-8-0.zip: 3fd835aa2bd5ac9b438b35942efe8470360b3d49322bae5c203fc1b1c2139156
SHA256 Mist-win32-0-8-0.zip: 37f5dd905bf86b108b39aadd11a7384dda249b3cac5c3ae14417e7808191bd44
SHA256 Mist-win64-0-8-0.zip: ff372d11ebf5ee7759b2063e961d15fb743465b59ccc68884e2796b75c9a4670