Sounds like you need a thin client. Electrum might do what you're looking for.  

With the improvements the bitcoinj team have made to downloading blocks, Multibit downloads around 1000 blocks a minute on a vanilla WiFi.   (It does not save the transactions to disk so it is not doing as much work as the Satoshi client).

I think of it as roughly 1 minute of download for 1 week of blocks.

I haven't really looked at memory size optimisation but think it uses around 100MB RAM when running 4 peers and half a dozen wallets.
Edit: Just had a quick look.   On a Mac with 12 wallets open, 4 peers it uses 133.5MB RAM.

Lot of ways to use Bitcoin conveniently, Electrum and Multibit have already been mentioned but web wallets such as the blockchain.info wallet deserve a mention too. Even for storage solutions the Satoshi client is inferior these days because we have Armory that is a heavy client that offers easy ways to safely handle offline wallets.

Bitcoin users really need to know that there are other viable options these days than the regular client. There are a lot of options. I still use the Satoshi client for some of my wallets but if I was actually using Bitcoin for commerce regularly, which I'm still not, I would not be using the Satoshi client. It's too slow unless you're not in a hurry to do anything.

jim618

I've just downloaded it, I did not know it existed before your message.

It is great! The only missing feature being encrypted wallets!

spiccioli

You probably do not know about the current generation of web wallets, what I'm talking about is not like MyBitcoin. The service provider can't run away with your money because they do not have your private key. They will only know an encrypted version of the private key and it will be decrypted entirely in your browser when used. There is even a wallet integrity tool available which checks that the wallet service hasn't been compromised.

So please, next time make sure you know what you're talking about before you start spreading FUD.

bitcoin-qt is using ~71megs of memory and only 2% CPU on my debian laptop right now
though took me almost 2 days to fully xfer the blockchain when I first installed

It's not back to square one. The wallet verification tool is run by the user on the user's computer. The point of it is to verify that the service is not sending malicious code. Also as memvola pointed out, P2SH will increase security further. In fact I believe that blockchain.info will probably be one of the first, if not the first wallet that actually has P2SH functionality in it. The site owner is already working on P2SH features.

Currently even if person x is not using the verification tool and the wallet got compromised, the vulnerability would be there only as long as people are still logging in. The site would be taken down and warnings posted all over the place if this happened so the window of opportunity is small in any case, so we have come far from MyBitcoin. With verifications and especially P2SH, it becomes basically worry-free entirely.

Yeah, but it makes it a long shot. I wouldn't choose to depend on a web wallet for my entire fortune, but could still use it for daily small transactions and maybe backup purposes (depending on the scheme).


Makes a lot of sense of course. One reason I can think of is a lack of multiplatform thin client that works on all your devices and you are not too enthusiastic about shuffling money through wallets. For instance, I probably could run Electrum on my N900 (not sure) if I spent some time on it, whereas blockchain.info/wallet would work instantly.

A javascript web-wallet with automated backups and a local verifier is analogous to a thin client that has forced updates. Forced updates aren't good though. Also, even with multisig, I'd probably prefer to maintain my secondary keys myself. However, for most people, this might not prove to be more reliable.

I think the structure will evolve to the point where wallets would be portable between clients and the standard two-factor authentication would work through the network itself. Then you can use whatever method is more convenient for you and fall back to the other method in case of emergencies. Even if you insist on relying on online services, you could keep a copy of your wallets on multiple sites. Of course, no combination of these sites shall have clear access to all the keys necessary to complete a transaction (which is tricky if you know nothing about how Bitcoin works).

To make the concept easier to grasp for laymen, banks/wallets and clearing houses/escrows could be totally separated, all of which provide a thin-client service as the standard transaction method (so that you would only need to access remote encrypted keys in case of emergencies). Don't see that happening even in the far future though.

Nice...   I'll try to run spesmilo while I'm at it too. Thanks for the tip.

Especially my wife will be happy when she sees this on her N900. She just started actively using Bitcoin, and constantly asking what her preferred client should be.