Do I need the bitcoin blockchain for having a simple wallet using the bitcoind (daemon)?

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I want to start playing around a bit with the technical side of Bitcoins (thinking of setting up an exchange). So I built a bitcoind (daemon) binary from source and now the docs say that when I run that, it will start downloading the blockchain, which is several GBs large and takes a couple hours.

The only thing I want to do however, is create a simple wallet and make transactions from and to it. And because I ultimately want to deploy this to a server, I would prefer to not download several GBs.

So do I really need to download the whole blockchain in order to get a simple bitcoin wallet? Or is there a smarter way than deploying a wallet on a server using the bitcoin daemon?

kramer65

Posted 2013-12-20T10:52:02.753

Reputation: 285

2Without the blockchain, there's no way to know what payments you've received, nor what funds you have already spent. – David Schwartz – 2013-12-20T11:09:03.767

But I recently just downloaded a simple wallet app on my android phone, and received bitcoins on that, and that didn't download gigabytes of blockchain files.. – kramer65 – 2013-12-20T16:59:04.713

The android wallet connects to it's own cloud service, where it has the blockchain. – ChrisW – 2014-02-02T19:39:50.440

Answers

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There are "lightweight" wallets, such as Electrum and mobile wallets, that do not require the blockchain to run. In exchange for this convenience however, their users rely on a centralized server (or servers) to host the blockchain, which is a bit of a security compromise.

bitcoind is the "Satoshi client" and is not a lightweight wallet. It won't work without the blockchain.

RentFree

Posted 2013-12-20T10:52:02.753

Reputation: 2 391

Asked: 2013-12-20T10:52:02.753

Viewed: 730 times

Active: 2014-02-02T17:22:35.077