BitcoinQT

[HongkongShanghaiBitCoin]

I thought I'd start a thread for the newbies who have questions regarding BitcoinQT. I'm currently downloading the client as this was recommended as the original wallet. My question is....how long is this going to take...I've been downloading for several days and it seems to go so slow since I got to the 90% complete mark.

I hope to get an answer to my question and to see future questions from newbies regarding bitcoinqt answered here in this thread by some of the more knowledgeable and experienced members of this forum.

[mprep]

Believe me it takes a LONG time even if you have a good Internet connection.

[btoth]

took me about 3 days on a 25 mb connection the first time

[AliceWonder]

It depends on how fast your connections are to nodes, it took me about 20 hours. My download tends to be about 20Mbps but faster connections can sync slower depending upon how well the peers can saturate it.

This was in Linux with /home separate physical disk from / so there was no lag due to disk arm activity (it could always eat data as fast as it came)

[orymh]

I love Bitcoin-Qt to death because it's the one, the only, the original. Unfortunately it's not the fastest, the most efficient, or the most user-friendly.

As stan.distortion mentioned, MultiBit (https://multibit.org/) is very quick to set up, and also easy to use. They added encryption of wallet files (very important for security) in April, so make sure you use version 0.5.9 or newer if you're going to try MultiBit. MultiBit supports multiple wallets, which is handy sometimes.

Electrum (http://electrum.org/) is another good option. One of its coolest features is that it uses a deterministic wallet: your wallet is created from a seed, which you can use to "recover" (really recreate from scratch) your wallet if something goes catastrophically wrong and you lose your wallet file and backups.

[AliceWonder]

: your wallet is created from a seed, which you can use to "recover" (really recreate from scratch) your wallet if something goes catastrophically wrong and you lose your wallet file and backups.

So if someone gets your seed, they can predict future addresses you haven't even generated yet?

[orymh]

: your wallet is created from a seed, which you can use to "recover" (really recreate from scratch) your wallet if something goes catastrophically wrong and you lose your wallet file and backups.

So if someone gets your seed, they can predict future addresses you haven't even generated yet?

Correct. Not only that, but they could replicate your current addresses and spend BTC from them. Letting anyone else get their hands on your seed would be very bad news.