With just mere days after the previous release, the Dark Wallet team has released alpha 5, which available for download here.

The Dark wallet team has been working hard to resolve the known issues. The latest version serves bug fixes as well as two major new features - BitID and watch only pockets - as well as some “heavy internal refactoring” according to the official release notes.

BitID

For the first time, the wallet is integrated with a major website by having a Bitid login. BitID makes it possible to log into a website validated by signing a Bitcoin message using one of the user's keys, so no passwords other than those used to secure your wallet is needed.

This links the website user to a public key that is controlled by the user i.e. a Bitcoin key held by the dark wallet. “We generate a Bitcoin address derived from the site name, so we generate more or less unique keys while keeping the key generation deterministic” explain the release notes.

The Dark wallet team also added that they are hoping to create a feature that will allow sign-ins with other crypto systems and trust and/or reputation confirmation to validate initial user trust on a website.

An example for mediawiki implementing bitid was posted so it can be used against the darkwallet: https://github.com/sembrestels/mediawiki-bitid

Watch only pockets

This feature makes it possible to configure custom pockets by linking a contact and adding different addresses to that contact. Now the user is able to monitor pockets that can hold any number of custom Bitcoin addresses in read-only mode. In other words, notifications and history can be only viewed and not be used to spend from.

This is a useful feature to not only link extra addresses that are especially used for incoming funds but also for devices like Bitcoin cash machines or mobile phone wallets.

Other upgrades

Other updates arriving with alpha 5 are an address scanner, new controls for history, per section urls, and a ‘Hard’ option for the mixer tool. “Big” architecture rework was also performed, which is the beginning of a big API cleanup planned for the official release.

Dark wallet also hinted that other feature “may be coming” such as MPK support, general support for other address or key schemes, and linking a stealth scanning key.

Again, testers are requested to continue to “test everything” with testcoins and report bugs here since the wallet is not yet stable and testers using real money are doing so at their own risk.

You can view a dark wallet setup tutorial video here, compliments of Kristov Atlas.