Post
Topic
Board Service Discussion
Re: Instawallet claim process
by
Phinnaeus Gage
on 04/04/2014, 23:30:16 UTC
I like IW, but something has changed recently and I can't put my finger on it.

[...]

~Bruno K~

PS: To be clear, the wallet address is 1JppeHVdYQEBGR4uHVTqLQsb2FY1wUTziH

Dear Bruno,

Instawallet has always worked like a shared wallet, nothing has ever changed in this respect.

The fact you used to see coins remain at the deposit address simply means that :
 - there used to be less coin turnover,
 - the cold storage was less used,
 - any combination of the previous reasons.

Some stuff does change though, you used to get your transaction ID back immediately when sending coins, that's not the case anymore, sends are now asynchronously handled by a background worker. That's much more secure in terms of potential race conditions, much more robust in terms of infrastructure, much more maintenable (since now I can simply stop the worker, do some work on bitcoind and switch it back on).

The traffic also increases a lot, to give you an idea, our average weekly turnover is around 10kBTC in, and 10kBTC out, it recently peaked at around 50kBTC/week.

Your wallet has exactly the amount you expect to be available, you can't rely on blockchain.info to tell you how much is available in an account on a shared wallet.

This is how your balance is calculated :



Hope it's clearer Smiley
You've always being running a fractional reserve bank through.

Ironically, this is what transpired the very next day, ~12 hours later: https://blockchain.info/tx/f0dba606f4d245c49a165035eabe3457949b8c04f33b0af53b17ffece01e9176



Why would InstaWallet need to transfer out bitcoins to wallet https://blockchain.info/address/1BcCo1dNztEjMtzxFTbtQuZEuK1NkvN8q5 that was later transferred to claims payout wallet?: https://blockchain.info/address/1LrPYjto3hsLzWJNstghuwdrQXB96KbrCy

https://blockchain.info/tx/4cf56d0c1566778030095925328f4bc7ae988657bd62fe8bc05ac67302d32b4c



With apologies for showing the value in $ oppose to BTC, which was my intent to remain consistent, this wallet - https://blockchain.info/address/1HEVQNxwuKx2nXdyqF86nAf49Epx5jS2Vk - was Bitcoin-Central's claims/unification wallet, and not InstaWallet's.

https://blockchain.info/tx/14a5adce82fecf976f9ec963c86a051d363ad7301bf96b055364de7a27b3bfee


Following pic depicts the same as above, but in dollars to show that it's the same as the first pict further above.

InstaWallet's Claims Wallet: https://blockchain.info/address/1JwXxGessiou1WaUaWXuttzkqnXFEbc4ZB

Bitcoin-Centrals Customer's Wallet: https://blockchain.info/address/1HEVQNxwuKx2nXdyqF86nAf49Epx5jS2Vk and possibly https://blockchain.info/address/1uAcfMBjRNZeQZumRhuyTLQskbUVgzkJm



I'm confident that MAC's post about InstaWallet being a fractional reserve bank through is what started the wheels in motion to orchestrate the supposed "HACK".