Bitcoin Forum

What do you think about adding wallet server functionality to the Bitcoin software? It would help establish a wallet protocol standard and make it easy for anyone to start a wallet server. People could then use their mobile and other lightweight clients to manage their account on any server. I believe the average user would rather use a 3rd party wallet service than download and store the block chain and worry about backups. Just like most people don't want to run their own email server, but the paranoid guy still has the option to do so.

We already have support for separate accounts, they just lack authentication. Another useful and user-friendly feature would be the user@domain.com address scheme proposed by Genjix (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=5938.0).

TL;DR Bitcoin should have clients and servers like the email protocol.

So if someone wanted to serve their own bitcoins, would they have to run separate client and server software? Or would the client software still be able to work independently?

I would think that a blockchain server would be more useful.  This would allow phone clients to have a local wallet.dat, and query a blockchain service to serve up the blocks necessary to validate a receiving transaction without needing a local copy of the blockchain.  A network drive might be able to do this decently well, but would result in a lot of network traffic for a smartphone.

No, the "server" version would be standalone as it is now.


Well, why not have both wallet and blockchain servers and let the user pick.