Bitcoin Forum

Hi

Currently all PCs in our household using bitcoin all have their own local copy of the block chain. Since some of them are quite low on hard disk space, I would like to have the  block chain on my Ubuntu server and all PCs running some sort of thin clients connecting to the server to get the block chain information. Is this possible out-of-the-box or should I look for a different solution?

Thanks
 Jan

Bitcoin Core and Armory are "Full Nodes".  Each instance will need its own full copy of the blockchain and it's own wallet.

If you want a thin client you might want to look into something like MultiBit.  MultiBit uses Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) and doesn't store the full blockchain.

You should be able to set things up so that the MultiBit wallets only connect to your own full nodes and therefore get all their block and transaction information from the full nodes you are already running.

That is exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks!

It seems like there *should* be some solution where you use a network mounted file system to share the blockchain between your nodes, but part of the issue with that is that each of your nodes is going to want to make it's own decisions about what should go or shouldn't go into the blockchain since determining consensus among nodes is an important part of the software.  So I guess Danny's solution is the only real one for you.  You basically want only a single full bitcoin node, but several wallet programs.

You might want to take a look at mSIGNA. Its not a classicaly SPV client, but the full node it needs can be on a local (or remote) network. IMHO its a very complex wallet though, but its also been a while since I looked at it.

Regarding Multibit configuration this should be helpful -> https://github.com/jim618/multibit/blob/master/configuration.md

use a lightwgt wallet