New Proposal Promises to Make Monero (XMR) Wallet Simpler

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One contributor to the Monero (XMR) project wants to reform the wallet’s GUI to account for the likelihood that some users may not be interested in the more technical details of running a full node and may instead want to just have a desktop computer program that accesses funds and handles transactions.

“The community has long stipulated that, in its current form, the GUI is not properly tailored to the less tech-savvy. I personally have acknowledged this particular issue and am therefore proposing to add a simple mode, which would be significantly better curtailed for the less tech-savvy,” wrote the contributor, who goes by the username dEBRUYNE-1.

The “simple mode” this person is proposing would remove options usually tailored for advanced users, such as the ability to select the testnet or stagenet of the Monero blockchain. Additional features, including one where advanced users could sign a transaction file in a cold storage wallet and broadcast it through a “hot” node that has view-only privileges, are also removed from the proposed mode.

The most important suggestion could be the ability to choose to connect immediately to a remote node instead of running a full node in the network. This would remove the whole node setup process and allow non-tech-savvy users to piggyback the wallet on top of another node in the network without having to download the 50 or so gigabytes of data from the blockchain.

The current interface already allows this, but the setup is slightly more complicated. Users wishing to connect to a remote node are greeted with the following:

Instead of connecting to a third-party server right away, the user must find a list of active remote nodes and connect to one, potentially latching onto an insecure node.

Something like automatic remote node connections already exists in the Bitcoin ecosystem through the Electrum wallet, but its interface suffers from similar flaws, sometimes requiring users to know the difference between BIP-39 and BIP-44 keys and hierarchies.

Riccardo Spagni, Monero’s lead developer, has not commented on the situation so far, but many of the other developers in the project favor the proposal.

Monero has historically been a “little guy’s” cryptocurrency and the leader in market capitalization among all privacy coins. One of this year’s major updates to the software ensured that mining continues to be profitable for individuals who do not possess specialized, expensive ASICs.

Source:  CRYPTOVEST