About Wallets

[croato]

hi, i am noob and would like some info on BTC wallets. have online wallet so now i would like to have client too but have limited mbytes internet traffic so i cant spend all on downloading wallet and sinchronising with network. can comeone give me approx size in mbytes wallets have to spend to get wallet in function and how much they spend daily. thank you.

[oriel2]

Use Multibit - really good wallet lightweight no need to download the whole chain, secure and easy to use desktop wallet (kept on your PC not online).

[DannyHamilton]

It sounds like you should look into either MultiBit or Electrum.

Electrum has the added benefit of using deterministic addresses.  This means you only need to create a single backup of the "seed" one time, and your entire wallet can be restored at any time in the future from that "seed". Electrum has the drawback of relying on a server for communicating with the bitcoin network, and carries a small risk of a malicious server interfering with the transactions/blocks that your wallet hears about.  There are various techniques used by Electrum to minimize the risk so it isn't very significant.

MultiBit connects directly to the bitcoin network, using SPV to verify payments instead of storing the complete blockchain.  It still needs to receive blocks and transactions from peers to perform SPV, but it doesn't need to store as much locally.  MultiBit does not use deterministic addresses, so you need to remember to create a new backup when you create new addresses.

I'm not sure which of the two wallets uses less communication bandwidth.  If I were to guess, I'd guess Electrum, but you might want to ask a bit more about the bandwidth usage of each wallet in their respective sub-forums:

Electrum
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0

MultiBit
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=99.0

[moriartypants]

Doesn't Electrum rely on someone else's servers to work on top of the bitcoin network?  If those servers ever go offline, what will happen to your wallet?

[DannyHamilton]

Doesn't Electrum rely on someone else's servers to work on top of the bitcoin network?  If those servers ever go offline, what will happen to your wallet?

You can connect to a new server, you can run your own server, or if you can't find a single Electrum server to connect to in the entire world, and you aren't interested in running one of your own, you can export the private keys and import them into some other wallet (such as Bitcoin-Qt, MultiBit, or blockchain.info/wallet)

[RGBKey]

Doesn't Electrum rely on someone else's servers to work on top of the bitcoin network?  If those servers ever go offline, what will happen to your wallet?

Only to be able to see your balance. I suggest Mycelium if you have an android phone, it's an excellent wallet.