Feature Request: Watch balances of bitcoin addresses without needing the private key

[omegamormegil]

I'd like to be able to include the balance from bitcoin addresses in my Armory BTC total without the need to use the private key.

This would be useful for watching the balance sent to a paper wallet or from a Casascius coin where I don't want to use (or don't have access to yet in the case of Casascius coins) the private key.

Currently, it looks like I can create a watching only wallet, which sounds like it would work, but I don't see a way to do this without using the private key on the offline computer. At the moment, the best way I know to do this is to check a balance by looking up the address on Blockchain.info.

If there is already a way to do this in Armory, I'd love to know how.

[yhaenggi]

etotheipi told me this will be possible with the new wallets format.

[stevenroose]

There is a question about this request on the Bitcoin SE here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10473/how-can-i-import-public-keys-into-armory

[leo-bogert]

I'm voting for this. There currently seems to be NO bitcoin client which supports creating a watch-only wallet from scratch.
Its fine that armory supports creating watch-only wallets from its own wallets. But that doesn't help you have been using the official bitcoind/bitcoin-qt for years and want to watch your bitcoind/bitcoin-qt wallets with armory without exporting the private keys.

[juancho64]

I've developed an app which allows you to easily see and organize your balances and convert them to many currencies at different market prices:

www.wonderwallets.com.ar

[stp-ip]

Any update on tracking public addresses?

[goatpig]

We're in the process of developing a new wallet format, notably integrate BIP32 support. This kind of features will have to added after the new format is in place.

[stp-ip]

Any ETA on the new wallet format, which includes new deterministic wallets I assume and finally the ability to import compressed private keys?

[goatpig]

It will have stuff like compressed keys and unicode comments, yes.

As for the ETA, I can tell you its our goal to release it for 0.92, can't tell you much about when though. Expect at least a few months.

[stp-ip]

Ok this will then correlate with multisig support too. Hurry up I wanna clean up my keys/setup ;)

[stp-ip]

Is the latest unstable testing version already mostly the 0.92 version? As there are still most features missing you were talking about @goatpig compressed addr. imports, deterministic wallets for lockboxes, watch-only wallets not just for armory. etc.

[goatpig]

0.92 is a "smaller" release exclusively for lockboxes. The features you are talking about aren't ready yet and won't make into this one. Most of them will be part of 0.93. The pace and nature of releases has changed since we have 5 full time developers: quicker releases with less features.

We could have released lockboxes a couple months from now with the rest of all this stuff we're working on, but why wait when it's ready to go?

[stp-ip]

Ok great to hear. Already tested the lockboxes and besides the non polished gui and non deterministic addresses +1.
So a couple months for this feature and the rest.