Bitcoin Forum

For infrequent and amateur use should I use multibit or bitcoin qt? Also, why does it take days to synchronize bitcoin qt whereas multibit happen in a matter of seconds?

Use Multibit, it looks like a nice clean program to me. Did few transactions with it - it worked;) I switched from qt-bitcoin to Multibit to avoid resyncing over days when You did not use it for some weeks.

Bitcoin qt need to download 14 GB blockchain and process it, this is why such wait time.
Multibit does not use blockchain I believe, it just connect to server to request required data about your address

I would recommend multibit, but please don't freak out if transactions go crazy.

Use the reset transactions option to rebuild your block; and restart afterwards.


bitcoin-qt takes a long time to get up and running, it needs to sync all the blocks.

on multibit you can have two or more wallet

You want to use MultiBit if you are just interested in having a local wallet.  MultiBit connects to peer nodes running bitcoind or Bitcoin-Qt when it needs block or transaction information, so it doesn't download the entire blockchain to your system.

I'm using bitcoin-qt for linux/ubuntu at the moment - what are people's thoughts on it? Is it the best/most secure choice for me or is there better out there ? Thanks in advance...

both are good

Armory is probably the most secure, but all of them should be secure enough. MultiBit is definitely the most user-friendly. If you cannot decide which wallet to use, then you should probably choose MultiBit.

It is most secure wallet, the only disadvantage is you must synchronize the blockchain everytime you start bitcoin-qt. It might take few minutes if you didnt used the wallet for a week

E415 you can choose "Bitcoin-qt" only if you are an expert, you know such to think backup after every "send" transaction and else, however if you want only the simplicity so just choose "Multibit" .

Multibit is a thin client that can send and receive funds. In addtion to being a wallet software, bitcoin-qt also runs as a relay node on the Bitcoin network, verifying and rebroadcasting other people's transactions and blocks. If your computer is always on and has a good internet connection, you could run bitcoin-qt as a service to the network, even if you wanted to use Multibit as your primary wallet software. If your computer is NOT always on or has a slow connection to the internet, you might actually be doing a disservice to the network by running as a relay node.

You dont need to backup after every send transaction, but like after every 100 send transactions.
And no need to be expert as well, Bitcoin-qt is easy to use app

I've been using Multibit for the past week or so and am very happy with it. I don't want to download bitcoin qt on my mining rig and that's the one online 24/7. I open Multibit once a day to let it sync my new deposits from the pool I'm mining then close it.
I think I'll get Armory once I actually start to accumulate funds. Looking at their program it seems easier to use cold storage with. Does anyone have feedback on that aspect of Armory?

Bitcoin-QT wastes tons of hard drive space (I mean >10GB and growing!) for storing the blockchain locally. Especially if you're on an SSD, definitely use MultiBit.

(Also this newbie restriction is stupid, I'm constributing nothing new here, yet I'm forced to make stupid posts until I'm allowed to post in the topic I was originially interested in...)

Multibit. No point in having to download 15+GB of blockchain and verifying tons of block everytime you launch it just to use it 5 minutes a day.

Multibit is also the recommended wallet from bitcoin.org

Thanks Open4lies - that is the main thing I want to know really I guess - I want the most secure wallet I can get - so that if I DO start making some decent profits from my two trading accounts I have the wallet set up and good to go for sending btc back to it for holding or whatever - until I want to send it to localbitcoins or wherever for selling...

i have multibit  and it was hacked. i lost all btc coins on it. i put encryption on wallet but no use. had some kind of trojan or backdoor virus and lost everything.
is there a way to retrieve coins ?

As far as I know there's no way to retrieve coins. :(

I'm using electrum, but just started. Like multibit, it doesn't require downloading the blockchain. I like the fact that Electrum generated a long passphrase, which I keep offline, that can be used to regenerate my keys if the wallet gets lost or trashed.

Any wallet that doesn't require that download/sync operation does need some other way of seeing your addresses on the blockchain to know about balances and confirmations. So things like Multibit and Electrum have to delegate that part to services somewhere that are nodes on the p2p network. The original bitcoin software is architecturally monolithic, containing the p2p node, miner and wallet manager all in one package. More recent developments decouple those things, which is architecturally more flexible (giving us the ability to have lightweight wallets for example) but a bit more complex, and complexity usually makes it things harder to secure.

Out of curiosity, for anyone who wants to answer, why is bitcoin-qt considered the most secure wallet?

I use Multibit and have no problems with it.

I've been using Armory and like it a lot. It's supposed to
be the most secure, and I found it easy to use and set up.

I do prefer electrum client instead multibit :)

It is generally a good idea to use a separate OS for wallet storage. If you are a Windows user, then another security measure is to run untrusted programs inside a virtual machine.

Multibit works great, absolutely no complaints about it. I recommend it to everyone.