<p>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.</p>

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

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-02T17:22:35.077Z
2014-02-02T17:22:35.077Z
RentFree
<p>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.</p>

<p>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. </p>

<p>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?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-20T11:09:03.767Z
Without the blockchain, there's no way to know what payments you've received, nor what funds you have already spent.
David Schwartz
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-20T16:59:04.713Z
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
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-02T19:39:50.440Z
The android wallet connects to it's own cloud service, where it has the blockchain.
ChrisW
<wallet><blockchain><bitcoind><daemon>
Do I need the bitcoin blockchain for having a simple wallet using the bitcoind (daemon)?
kramer65
# Do I need the bitcoin blockchain for having a simple wallet using the bitcoind (daemon)?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-12-20)

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?

**Tags:** wallet, blockchain, bitcoind, daemon

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Without the blockchain, there's no way to know what payments you've received, nor what funds you have already spent.  
> **username_0**: 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..  
> **username_2**: The android wallet connects to it's own cloud service, where it has the blockchain.  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2014-02-02. Score: 2

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.


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