Electrum import Bitcoin wallet

Folks, it’s time at last. Announcing Bitwasp, the marketplace that stores no user funds.

I’ve spent a lot of my recent time working on this code in the background, not posting to Github. There wasn’t much I could say, since rebuilding the project was a huge undertaking, it didn’t justify posting incremental, broken commits to Github. It needed to be fairly well tested, and I’ve had to work on things like OP_CHECKSIG functionality, rewriting the system so it used a scraper rather than relying in incoming wallet transactions, and refactoring the order system.

Since most of you are familiar with the live-wallet version, I’ll describe what’s new:
- No more ‘Bitcoin’ link on the navigation panel.
- Instead of giving funds a regular address to pay to, which enables all sorts of scams, and can lead to theft, multisignature transactions are now standard, for up-front payment or escrow.(***)
- Administrators must enter an electrum master public key(*) to derive addresses for registration fee payment’s, and keys for multisig addresses. Let me just say now that this is what attackers will be trying to change. Secure your admin account with 2FA.
- Vendors can enter a list of public keys(**) in advance of accepting orders, or will be prompted to enter keys if they have none available when creating an order.
- Buyers must enter public keys on a per-order basis(**).
- The order process in the old version pretty much just moved around magic numbers (user balances) in a database to grant entitlement to coins on the wallet. Now, once funds leave a multisig address, they pay directly to the users key that was used to create the address.
- Users need to sign multisignature transactions. I’ll explain in detail below…

* It isn’t my intention to force people to use a particular client, however electrum is the only deterministic key derivation algorithm that sees mainstream use. (**)
** – Forcing users to enter a list of keys, or individually, or solely from an MPK, sucks. However, this is an acceptable solution until clients adopt BIP32, which will be the case for the next version of electrum, and eventually all the others as well.
*** – Since vendors/buyers can go missing during an order, 2 of 3 multisignature addresses are used for escrow and up-front payments, so funds are recoverable.