Bitcoin Wallet for Android

In: Business Ideas|Technology|The Future By: Brian Armstrong

6 Jul 2011

Tonight a buddy of mine (who works at Google) and I released an open source application.

It’s an Android app for Bitcoin that allows you to have a digital “wallet” on your phone. Here are a few screenshots:

Simply put, the app allows you to send and receive bitcoins from your Android phone.

If you’ve never heard of bitcoin then you aren’t alone. It is a very new technology. After reading about bitcoin I still wasn’t sure what might become of it, but I wanted to learn more and figured the best way would be to dive in and build something with it!

If I had to sum up bitcoin in one sentence I’d say it is a “distributed peer-to-peer currency”. But what does this mean and why is it important?

I think it’s most important features are that it…

allows you to send money without transactions fees
allows you to send money instantly, anywhere in the world
and (it appears) it can do this securely

If you contrast this with how most payments work today, most merchants pay 2-3% as a transaction fee to Visa or Mastercard (and this fee is partially passed on to you as a consumer). In addition, whenever you want to move money between accounts it can take up to 3 business days. With bitcoin, there are no transaction fees and money can be moved instantly, anywhere in the world. This is a potentially very disruptive technology, even if it looks like a toy today.

Bitcoin accomplishes this using cryptography across a large number of servers on the internet, and doesn’t rely on one trusted third party (a bank) to control the money.

It’s also important to realize that bitcoin is not a new product or service, it is a new platform. Much like email or the internet itself, it has no centralized servers and many products and companies can be built on top of it (our app is just one). It’s also an open source project itself so anyone can see how it works and it isn’t owned by anyone. In fact, thousands of computer scientists around the world have looked at it at this point. This gives it a lot of potential to survive and adapt over the years.

Whether it ever becomes mainstream or not is still very much an open question (I have mixed thoughts on this). However, at present there is already about $100M in real money tied up in the bitcoin economy, so it has certainly shown some early promise. There are already a few stores starting to pop up who accept bitcoin.

I think a day will come very soon where we no longer need to carry a physical wallet, and our smart-phones will take over that job. I also think it would be great for the economy to not pay a tax of 2-3% on each transaction to Visa or Mastercard (both for businesses and consumers).

For a glimpse of how this might work, checkout this little demo video we put together. It shows us instantly transferring money between two phones using just the internet and a distributed network of computers around the world.

The QR codes you see used there could be on a point of sale device in a store, a mobile device like a phone, or a sticker on the wall.

It’s important to realize that those two phones could have been anywhere in the world. If you’d like to send money to another country today, Western Union takes a hefty fee and will take days. Even Paypal charges 2-3% and will take 3 business days to move money in and out of an account. Bitcoin is instant, and has zero transaction fees. You can do it from any computer, including a smart phone like the one shown here.

Anyway, I’ll see if I can post more about this in the future. But let me know what you think in the comments below. And if you have an Android Device, you can download it from the Android Market here. It is 100% free and open source.

Finally, if you are a developer, here is a link to the github project page.

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8 Responses

Chris Robinson

July 7th, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Hi Brian,

First off, I have to say great work on the app! I really think making Bitcoin mobile and accessible is the key for it’s future success and this is a monumental step :-).

The reason I am contacting you (other than to congratulate you on your amazing efforts!) is to let you know I am a freelance Icon/UI and I would love to work with you on this if my help is needed at all. I have worked for some large companies such as Apple, Sony Electronics and Sony Ericsson, and would love to lend a hand to this revolution. My portfolio is viewable at http://www.crobbo.com

If you have the time, please check it out. I’d love to chat about this with you.

All the best,
Chris Robinson

Brian Armstrong

July 9th, 2011 at 8:41 pm

We’d love to have a professional touch on the icon and UI if you’d like to submit some ideas! It’s an open source project so everyone is volunteering their time, but we’d be happy to include an attribution link for anything we use. Thanks for the kind words!

mbelousov

July 8th, 2011 at 5:16 pm

Wanted to bring this to your attention:
http://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin+heist

It may be “secure” technically speaking, but the keys are as secure as the PC/device running it.

On top of that, MtGox (largest bitcoin exchange imo) got whacked shortly after that and shutdown while they reversed trades and rebuilt things. That caused quite the uproar.

Nice app though, was wondering when someone was going to bring it to Android, congrats!

Brian Armstrong

July 9th, 2011 at 8:43 pm

Thanks!

Yep agreed, bitcoin doesn’t change the possibility of having money stolen from individuals or exchanges just like real money. The underlying framework to prevent double spending appears sound though. This was the major innovation of it over trusted third parties I think.

Thanks for the kind words!

Filip

September 12th, 2011 at 5:32 pm

Does anybody know bit coin waller for iOS?
filip (at) secretarylist.com

Ben

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JLansing

October 26th, 2011 at 9:32 am

Wow! Thank you for this. I found this in the app store the other day and just used it for the first time. I was wondering is it possible that you can have this programmed so that he can read a q r code from either email or a website? Right now as far as I can see you have to use the camera to scan a q r code and that is not possible if the person is inside another country. I’m loving what I’m seeing and any thoughts on this would be awesome thank you very much again.

Breaking Free

Bitcoin Wallet for Android

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