Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin developers work on bitcoin core. Why don't they create an official bitcoin wallet as well? It will be exactly like bitcoin core, but without the blockchain. I always had that query.

It's called decentralization. They are all official. But check them out with people who know, and then test the ones you download or use. Only after you are positive they are good, then put a chunk of bitcoin into them.

8)

An "official" wallet would be a single point of failure. A healthy ecosystem of various alternative wallets is important to avoid relying too much on a single dev team.

Also it would go kinda against the openness of the project. Having an official Bitcoin wallet would strike me just as strange as having an official Linux distro.

How not?

https://bitcoin.org/en/wallets/desktop/windows/bitcoincore/?step=5&platform=windows

What does not exist is an official wallet. And if you don't understand why it doesn't exist, you still don't understand what Bitcoin is. Decentralization is necessary for security

Bitcointalk promotes https://bitcoin.org/en/download and it comes from bitcoin.org. It's not official but consider it one as its the most stable. It will however download the whole blockchain for you. Anyone who has the skills can create a wallet and then monetize it for fees which is the purpose for some developers, it becomes more decentralize when its opensource.

You do not need to bother yourself about this, there are alternatives, there are decentralized spv versions with open source blockchain. There are also very good wallets like electrum. Electrum source code is an open one which is available on github, it is also a good wallet. Bitcoin and  bitcoin wallets are so decentralized than for you to be thinking of such wallets, as they actually existing. Try decentralized spv versions or wallets like electrum.

Maybe I don't understand your question, but Bitcoin Core is the official bitcoin wallet. And what do you mean by "without the blockchain"?

Are you asking why Bitcoin Core doesn't also provide a separate lite/SPV wallet? I suppose the answer is that it is unnecessary since there are plenty of others, plus that development is not closely tied to the Bitcoin protocol.

That's true I was victimized by a scam wallet, it's open sourced any individual, group or companies can create and launch Bitcoin wallet, we have many wallets now the only way to safeguard yourself is to audit the team and the source and read lot of reviews before using them, when it comes to wallets, reputation ranks high in the list.

if you don't do your research you will end up losing everything.

bitcoin core is the reference implementation of bitcoin protocol. there is no such thing as "official" in a decentralized system because there is no centralized authority to release one.

A bitcoin core without blockchain... i see, is just like KFC without chicken...  :P

For a service like this someone has to run the node and provide the service, and that service will have a lot of responsibility because it will hold the customers private key... so, is a risky move, and we can't trust in any random user launching a service like this.

But Blockchain.com already thinks about this idea and already launch the service ;)

Bitcoin is decentralized and it has an open source code. Everyone can build up their bitcoin wallets if they have required skills base on Bitcoin protocol.

Official means centralized.

"Official" usually means they can get away with stealing your stuff. :P

Add https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

Please explain.

Well said Satoshi Nakamoto did not designate any Bitcoin wallet in his time since it's open-sourced any person or company can create one and there's a lot of wallets now and more are coming up, the most popular wallets now are the multi-currency wallets like Atomic Exodus, because it's profitable business these kinds of wallet has a build-in exchange.

If the bitcoin developers will create an official bitcoin wallet then what would be the purpose of it? A main wallet for those who are carrying bitcoins? there are a lot of wallets here in the industry and those are wallets that no one are controlling. If the bitcoin developers make their own wallet then probably they are the one who has control over those wallets.

The official wallet will serve same as that of the PayPal, this means the service will be centralized and market widening won't happen. Now with the network being decentralized more and more number of wallet services have emerged paving path for the growth of bitcoin.

If developers keep focus on developing an official wallet, even a small hack or security breach will directly affect the trust over the network altogether. Now with different number of wallets, the cryptocurrency network becomes stronger than before.

I don't see why Bitcoin Core wouldn't develop an SPV simply because it insists on being only a full client, valid question to ask, though I'd say it's because there are plenty of good SPVs out there maybe and there's no more market to fill?

Although, your analogy... KFC did realise the need to cater for those who don't want to wait for the whole bucket, or who might only want to stick around for fries;) or a period in 2000s while killing time actually went to KFC to get stuff without chicken (fries, rice and coleslaw for really cheap).

Because you are now in control of your own wealth and you are offered several different choices to exercise that freedom.  ;)  There are no centralized organization or government to dictate to you, on what wallet would be the "official" wallet or what restricted choices you should have.

Imagine a scenario where people are all forced to use one or two wallets and those wallet providers goes down.. it would severely influence Bitcoin's future. It would also make things a lot easier for government sanctioned hacks to take down Bitcoin, if they hacked those two wallet providers or a large collection of users of those services.  ::)

To store bitcoin. I think if they would be launching an official bitcoin wallet, it will be more trusted since it came from the developers of bitcoin. But this thing is not really necessary because there are a bunch of trustworthy wallets that we can rely on for storing and transacting our bitcoins.
Creating such wallet from the btc devs... ofcourse they will have the control of the wallet that they have made. Just like the wallets that we are using at the moment(in which owners/developers has the control over it. Over our wallet, over our funds).

'official bitcoin wallet', 'It will be exactly like bitcoin core, but without the blockchain'
Sounds interesting, what are you talking about, how to be like bitcoin without blockchain. I do not understand what you mean. There are a lot of companies developing blockchain wallets right now and they are doing so well that there is no need to create a bitcoin wallet. That would take more time for the DEV team instead of focusing on bitcoin development.

Before I first entered the cryptocurrency world I had been given advice to use official wallet for blockchain aka Blockchain.info. It taked me a month to understand that that wallet was neither official nor for blockchain. Later, I knew that there is nothing "official" in bitcoin due to decentralized, permissionless and open source nature of it. Everyone is free to build own applications, to innovate and improve the network. You can build a wallet for your family, for example, and call it "Our family wallet", it would be official for your relatives and that's the beaty of the bitcoin. Official financial application only for you and your family. However, for others it wouldn't be official, because they are free to build their own "official" wallet.

Yes, but I see people getting confused that the original bitcoin wallet is bitcoin.com or blockchain.com. Because this is what google returns to them. I agree with the decentralisation, but it isn't centralized if the bitcoin developers made the wallet. It wouldn't be closed source neither.

You don't need to worry about this, because Bitcoin looks real and official, in my opinion creating an official wallet yourself is not as easy as you think because everything takes a long time to create, but for Bitcoin wallets you can use blockchain if you want to store it because blockchain already looks very safe and good, everyone is also using blockchain wallets to store their Bitcoins. So for that you don't need to think about something that makes you confused about this.

Yes, it's a shame that the owners of those 2 domains are supporters of Bitcoin clones and unsafe wallets. But that's just because people obviously click the domains containing more known terms like blockchain, bitcoin, coinbase etc. before they click anything else.

Are you basically proposing an "official wallet" as in a "bitcoinwalletofficial"-like website? Any domain - or software - could be changed at any time in the wrong way. Even the said "official" wallet. The thing is, there should be alternatives. Bitcoin.org gives you an alternative for every use case you may be needing. Having a single "official" website/wallet is bad from a decentralization PoV. By having one more alternative that pops up into your eyesight whenever you look Bitcoin up, you're just going to have one more domain on the list of websites newbies tend to click.. or taking it another way, it'd be as if blockchain.com never existed and you proposed it.

Simply because Bitcoin was decentralized and that what makes this coin so powerful without control of anyone. If this such this wallet exist, there's no doubt that this will be popular and will be more trusted by everyone. However, this will be kind of easy to control, this will not become decentralized and tons of trusted wallet might close that could possibly affect the crypto world.

I think mate those who own the system have control over it. Well, technically not entirely because you have control over your passphrase, pins, and such but remember, believe it or not, they are the developers of the system so they have full control over it.

Unfortunately declaring a wallet "official" is not going to change that. Someone just heading towards the first site that looks appealing won't bother looking for an "official" label either.

At least in my Google search results Bitcoin.org tops the other sites, so at least that's something. Also Bitcoin's wikipedia page only references Bitcoin.org and not that other site, presumably because as far as Bitcoin is concerned there's nothing noteworthy about Bitcoin.com to begin with.

Then that would go against the fact that it should be decentralized, giving the whole power to one person

There is no official bitcoin wallet because it is decentralized. The only one who are in control with our wallet is ourselves, owners. If there is an official wallet, it only means that it is being controlled and handled by a third party, being decentralized will be useless and the true function of bitcoin will be set aside.

bitcoin is decentralized, so there is no need to create an official wallet. anyone can make a bitcoin wallet application and anyone can use it. it's just that scammers can take your money if you are not careful in choosing a wallet

Would you mind telling us what wallet has scammed you? There were too many reputated wallet that is available now and to add to it there's a non-custodial wallets. It's rare for me to find someone who was scammed by a wallet service provider.

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Decentralization is what bitcoin is, This gives us the freedom to create and own a wallet on our own as long as you we have the skill or knowledge to build one. Having only a "official wallet" that can be used is I think is a centralization.

Bitcoin was created for giving financial freedom in the possibile ways but if we have something called official wallet then more bitcoins will be stored there so it could go against the decentralization, bitcoi core is something like official wallet for Bitcoin but the o e who created Bitcoin didn't mention it.

By the way,why we need an official wallet if every wallet which gives private keys to you!

A Bitcoin wallet is a program that stores private keys also A Bitcoin wallet is analogous to a physical wallet. However, instead of storing physical currency, the wallet stores relevant information such as the secure private key used to access Bitcoin addresses and carry out transactions. Types of Bitcoin wallets are desktop, mobile, web, and hardware.

There will be never something called official bitcoin wallet. Because of the bitcoin decentralization there is not any official wallet. however, you can still store your funds on bitcoin core which is available free and open source on github. But, still you can check the other opensource wallets on github and maybe create your own customized bitcoin wallet with some knowledge.

I have an obviously old setup that I have not used in many years.  Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 appears to sync the blockchain and is up to date.  Armory 0.95.1 starts and scans fine, shows a balance , past transactions, and says it is online.  Everything "looks" good.  The question is can I still reliably send bitcoins?  Are these core and Armory versions still compatible with todays blockchain and network?

I ask because I had a similar situation with Litecoin, although there I was running a much older version of Litecoin Core.  In that case I tried sending some litecoins and they got hung up and the transaction was never recognized and it messed up my core wallet.  I had to update to the newer core and use a backup of my wallet.

So I don't really want to "just try it".  Also with all the issue I read here regarding the latest core + Armory + offline issues, I don't want to fight an update unless I really have to.

So, will core v0.13.2 and Armory 0.95.1 still actually work and send/receive bitcoins o.k.? :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[

Changes in bitcoin have been backward compatible so you can still continue using the old versions of the software and sync with the network but your software is lacking many new features including the SegWit options that aren't recognized by the old version. So you can't send coins to a SegWit address since the support for it was added in core v. 0.16.

Bitcoin is decentralized that's why there are no official wallets when you are storing bitcoin, unlike banks they are centralized they have the main bank that controls the cash flow within the economy.

I agree. I think one of the main reason why bitcoin doesn't have any official wallet is that because of it being a decentralized and unstable coin. Bitcoinis one of the most subscribe coin as of today because of its recently achievement or milestone. Bitcoin doesn't have any official wallet but there's more other wallet that you can use in order to save up some. A lot of wallet but each of one has its own differents and unique capahilities. Bitcoin today had achievea way best milestones. Be sure to check each wallet, more importantly rhe fees.