I want to install the Mist Wallet and store my Ethereum in it. However, I wanted to know how stable the Mist Wallet is. Is it safe and reliable to use?
The reason I ask this is because there are frequent new Beta releases on the github here: https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
So, which version is safe to use and is it OK to store my ethereum in a wallet which is still in Beta phase?
Looks like they are doing bug fixes almost every few days.
There are a lot of bugs and updates happening with the interface but it's just an interface that allows you to interact with the blockchain. The blockchain and protocol and key generation are all stable (and have been stable).
The bugs have to do with syncing, seeing tokens, etc. To my knowledge no one has lost Ether due to a bug in Mist.
Use whatever the latest release is.
If you want to be extra careful, you may want to check your private key derives the correct address and that you can access the newly generated account before sending a large chunk of ETH to it. You will want to verify on a couple of different clients using different languages (ie: geth (go), eth (c++), parity (rust), etc. You can also send a small amount to the account and then send that small amount back. If successful, you can be 100% confident that you have access to your ETH (given that you do not lose your keystore file or password in the future.)
The only issue I've encountered so far is a communication error between Ethereum Wallet and geth via the IPC socket (running on Linux).
This error fixes itself after about 5 minutes. I can then send transactions and watch contracts successfully.
I've so far encountered one error with Ethereum Wallet 0.7.2 communicating with geth using the IPC socket, in Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS .
If I try to browse a contract, the screen appears blank as shown below:
If I select the Developer -> Toggle Developer Tools -> Wallet UI menu and browse the Console, I get an error message "IPC Connection Error" (shown in red).
If I then wait about 5 minutes and then try to browse the contract again, the expected READ FROM CONTRACT and WRITE TO CONTRACT fields are correctly displayed as shown below:
I've just spent about an hour trying to send some ethers to TheDAO and worked out that this IPC problem is the cause for the transaction failing.
I reported this same IPC socket issue #515 to the developers 11 days ago when I was testing Ethereum Wallet as documented in How to watch contracts on Mist without ABI?, but there is no progress on this issue yet.
