Choose Your Node with the Airbitz Wallet

June 9, 2017

As we had previously published a few weeks back, Airbitz takes the stance that we desire both of the two primary Bitcoin scaling solutions put forward by the industry, bigger blocks and Segwit + Lightning Networks. The unfortunate bitter battle, however, has put adoption of either implementation at a near deadlock. Users have created strong ties to various proposed protocol solutions and prefer to support them with their choice of software implementation.

The Airbitz architecture by default connects to various Electrum based public bitcoin nodes to query and send transactions to the Bitcoin network. Part of that architecture, which is inherent to other mobile, light-client SPV wallets, is to choose nodes that follow the longest chain.

However, as of version 2.4.1, the Airbitz mobile wallet allows users to specify their own list of Electrum nodes which could be running on any bitcoind compatible implementation such as Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Unlimited, or Bitcoin Classic.

To choose your own list of nodes, simply go to Settings and at the bottom enable Override Bitcoin Servers. Then enter a list of servers in the text field to which your wallet should connect to. The list should be in the format:

stratum://[servername1]:[port]
stratum://[servername2]:[port]
stratum://[servername3]:[port]

For example

stratum://electrum-bc-az-eusa.airbitz.co:50001
stratum://electrum.jdubya.info:50001
stratum://electrum.hsmiths.com:8080

You can enter as many servers as you wish, but note that Airbitz will only connect to 4 nodes and will chose those that provide the best network connectivity. To utilize the new server list, tap on Transactions to exit Settings, then logout of the account, and log back in. This setting is persistent to an account and will propagate between a user’s devices

We realize that part of the Bitcoin ethos is choice, and while consensus eventually needs to be met, the process by which we get there involves a vote on how to move the protocol forward. Airbitz hopes to enable users to exercise their vote and support their protocol implementation of choice.

Thanks

Paul Puey

CEO / Co-founder