Re: Bridgewalker now in public beta: wallet with a twist - transact in BTC, hold USD
FAN-TAS-TIC 
Glad you like it! :-) .. I agree with some of the points you make! Although personally I would rather see something like Bridgewalker becoming obsolete in the long run and - as the Bitcoin economy matures - things moving completely over into BTC. If only for efficiency reasons (avoid constant currency exchange). But at the moment that's simply not practical and probably will not be for quite some time. The popularity of payment processors like BitPay show, that at this point it is necessary to peg prices to USD because there is just too much volatility. And that's fine. This tool aims to bring the same concept to the customer side. Where merchants accept BTC and end up with USD, customers can use Bridgewalker to hold USD and pay in the form of Bitcoin transactions. The important point is, that Bitcoin is the neutral interface between them.
1. on the phones web browser go here and click on the URI link in the first section.
http://lovebitcoins.org/developers.html
does it open your wallet app and pre-compose a send bitcoins transaction with the address and amount filled in? and then wait for the "send" button to be pressed?
2. use your app to scan the QR code in the second section. does it also bring in the address and amount?
http://lovebitcoins.org/developers.html
does it open your wallet app and pre-compose a send bitcoins transaction with the address and amount filled in? and then wait for the "send" button to be pressed?
2. use your app to scan the QR code in the second section. does it also bring in the address and amount?
Scanning the QR code works! I support both things like "bitcoin:1asdf?amount=0.123" as well as the "broken" variant with "bitcoin://1asdf"
The URI link does not work at the moment, I haven't looked into where exactly I need to hook into there. But I definitely plan to support that! I'll let you know, when an update is available.
But what about trust? Namely, who does the user have to trust?
I skimmed the website, and it wasn't clear to me what happens when an account is created. Is this an account with the Bridgewalker service? Or with Mt. Gox? Do you have access to the bitcoin transactions involved in using this app? What about the Mt. Gox accounts used?
I skimmed the website, and it wasn't clear to me what happens when an account is created. Is this an account with the Bridgewalker service? Or with Mt. Gox? Do you have access to the bitcoin transactions involved in using this app? What about the Mt. Gox accounts used?
Aw, yes, I should put more details about that on the site. The account is with Bridgewalker and all Bitcoin transactions are going to and from Bridgewalker's Bitcoin daemon. Bridgewalker in turn has then one single account with Mt.Gox and transfers bitcoins between it's own wallet and the account at Mt.Gox to do the trading. The end result is, that most user funds end up in Bridgewalker's Mt.Gox account in the form of USD. So you need to trust that a) Mt.Gox keeps their user accounts safe in general and b) I keep the access to Bridgewalker's Mt.Gox account in particular safe. Only a small amount of funds are in BTC at any time, basically just a small hot wallet to be able to send out transactions quickly.
I'll answer more questions later, as I will be away from the computer for a few hours. Thanks for all the feedback so far!