mist

Notice: I get that they advertise this as diversity. But from the perspective of someone who just wants to use the software it would be a lot easier if I don't have to sieve through 5 commercial websites. Also: For the $ 1 billion they hold in assets [0] I'd expect them to provide at least one full set of usable software from it, not just specifications on how to write the software - which is what they seem to only be producing now? They already cancelled their GUI wallet some years ago (https://github.com/ethereum/mist) which was kind of weird already considering that people did have money in it already. But you could at least resort to using geth as a terminal UI client. Now it seems ETH holders won't be able to access their funds using fully official software at all, which is kinda "meh", no matter if you're pro-crypto or against. [0]

There is no bank account, just the smart contract. It holds the Ether, OMG, or whatever other cryptocurrency you send to it when you buy Unum. There's a function on the contract to return the total reserve in USD, or you can check the actual values of the variables being used. Anything on a smart contract is public. You're right that relatively few people have the technical skills to query a smart contract, but that relative few is still a LOT of people who can verify the reserves independently. Versus the almost 0 people who can audit Tether. If you're interested in interacting with the smart contract (or any smart contract), you may want to install Mist. It's non-trivial to get started, I admit, and the tooling around smart contract is incredibly immature, but..man it's cool ;) https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases

How is this different than using Mist? (https://github.com/ethereum/mist)

It's just kind of crazy to me the amount of DAO-specific lines of code that have been put into apparently Mist and Geth, e.g. just search "DAO" on these links [1], [2] How many many man hours have been spent on introducing a single DAO-fork feature into the code? They didn't even build it as a generic "community referendum fork" feature just something specific to this situation? They can say "the community decides" but the community didn't decide to dedicate that amount of dev resources to putting a band-aid on a single community member's fuckup. What a mess. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/1b2941cd56d69... [2] https://github.com/ethereum/mist/commits/0.8.1

The developers appear to be treating this as a dev environment - "We were starting a new team (welcome @hiddentao, @evertonfraga and @luclu) and I was pushing for weekly releases, without proper testing. Meanwhile the DAO happened, and we wanted to make a release that had support for events subscription without realizing the performance impact it would have..." https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases/tag/0.7.5 I realize this is the wallet development but they are absolutely related and shows the culture of this software is not as professional or thought out as it should be.

Just download the mist wallet and mine on the test network which is what you should be doing if you are playing with it anyway. https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases

Looking through the getting started, one of the instructions is to run geth with the following flags. `--rpc --unlock 0 --rpccorsdomain "*"`. Please be very careful with these two flags as they will allow any malicious javascript on any page you browse to empty your ethereum wallet. https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases/tag/0.3.6 Also, this looks really cool.