Our service helps people track their bitcoin addresses without opening their wallet. Opening wallets have security implications since if your computer is compromised this might help the “bad guys” get your bitcoins. Similar to taking your wallet out near a potential mugger. Some people keep their wallets offline (often called “cold storage”) and cannot open their wallet often. Some people have a wallet on their home pc and want to track the wallet at work. On the other hand people want to know if there is a change in their bitcoin addresses – did they receive bitcoins? Were bitcoins spent? Our service lets people view their bitcoin addresses using software they use most – email clients, browsers and rss readers. Using WalletRss is simple. Once you register you can add a special tacking url of your bitcoin address (formatted as an RSS feed) to Microsoft Outlook and be updated on your bitcoin address with the same software you read your mail with.
Any application that can read RSS feeds, Microsoft outlook, apple mail, firefox, chrome, smartphone rss readers. There is a list of most of the possibilities on our http://www.walletrss.com/ . I use outlook all the time and it is very comfortable for me to track my bitcoin address using outlook.
Yes. If someone subscribes to our service and you know their address you can see the transactions in their wallet as well.
No. wallets are not private. The way to allow bitcoin to be uncontrolled and open to anyone the bitcoin network was built in a p2p architecture where all bitcoin transactions are broadcasted to all bitcoin clients. One of the benefits with this architecture is that it is hard for thieves to change the ledger in every copy for their advantage. bitcoin Wallets however can be somewhat anonymous if wallet owners actively try to be anonymous. For example paying for a TV that is delivered to your home with bitcoins does not keep you anonymous as the store knows that your bitcoin address belongs to you.
Our service is almost free. In order to activate a tracking address that address needs to send some bitcoin change to our address. Since there is no minimum charge people can send less than $0.01 and activate their address. We of course hope people will be more generous as these transfers help us run the service 🙂
Sure. If you keep outlook open all day and add to it the WalletRSS tracker than you will be notified when something changes in your bitcoin address. If someone has access to your wallet and spends some of it you will be notified but that person wants to steal all your bitcoins you are probably late and your wallet is gone.
On our roadmap we have secure feeds, private feeds, email alerts and business api among other ideas. 🙂