How about a read-only wallet; think Monero's "view key"

I see you boys are developing your light-weight wallet spec. https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-sl/pull/2669/files

Would you consider the use case where someone wants to demonstrate an account balance to a third party? A read-only wallet if you like. Or a Monero view key, to use another ecosystem’s nomenclature.

Martin wants to let Bob see how much ADA he has in his wallet - real time, all the time - how are you going to do that?

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Not sure if such feature would be easy (or possible in current architecture) to implement. But for starters it would be nice (and fairly easy) to allow to configure Daedalus to not create new address on each outgoing transaction. Then Daedalus would send money back to the same address from where initial output was taken.

In that case Martin could give Bob the main address of his wallet and Bob could monitor it thru standard explorer. It’s not the same, as it would require Martin to maintain the wallet in a special way, in which he maybe wouldn’t want to maintain it under normal circumstances. But we should consider the fact that such a use-case is not that standard and popular too.

This would be fairly optimal workaround, and very nice in terms of cost\profit ratio.

UPD:

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That’s one solution, but not a great one IMHO, because now EVERYONE can see the balance. It would be better if ONLY myself + the people I allow to check can. It should be possible to also see all the transactions.

I’m not a developer so I don’t know how difficult it is, but a view only wallet, like Monero has, would be the correct solution IMHO.

https://www.monero.how/how-to-verify-your-monero-funds-with-a-private-view-key

I disagree. This space is extremely young, the most common use cases have not even been thought of yet. Demonstrating your balance and transaction history to someone else would probably be required for any kind of lending. It also allows limited functionality “wallets” that can be run on unsecure devices without any risk of losing your coins. Make a thing possible and the masses will work out the use cases.

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