architecture limitations

[btcnut]

One thing that I have noticed getting setup is that the block chain download is a rediculous hurdle to getting started. This is obviously only going to get worse over time and will impact the overall scalability of bitcoin.

How much headway has been made in having a semi-centralised architecture than enables light weight clients to operate in a managable fashion?

Anyone got some good links that discuss the future state of BTC design?

[John (John K.)]

One thing that I have noticed getting setup is that the block chain download is a rediculous hurdle to getting started. This is obviously only going to get worse over time and will impact the overall scalability of bitcoin.

How much headway has been made in having a semi-centralised architecture than enables light weight clients to operate in a managable fashion?

Anyone got some good links that discuss the future state of BTC design?

Use Electrum or some client of the BitcoinJ family. Electrum's blockchain is in the cloud, whereas clients of the BitcoinJ family normally have a minimal blockchain size of 20~ mb.

[btcnut]

How do they manage the wallet in a secure fashion?

Given that a decent portion of the BTC community seems to be scammers of one sort or another, how does one know that theyre safe? Are they externally validated somehow?

[Endgame]

I wonder will the bitcoin development team will ever release a liteweight satoshi client which uses a cloud hosted blockchain? I think it would be a good idea at some point, as users will probably always trust the satoshi client more than a third party client like electrum.

[Stephen Gornick]

One thing that I have noticed getting setup is that the block chain download is a rediculous hurdle to getting started. This is obviously only going to get worse over time and will impact the overall scalability of bitcoin.

A recent conversation on the topic, here:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99742.0

There are at least two big changes coming up that improve things dramatically:

1) LevelDB switches out BDB for a better database, which can (on some types of hardware) give significant speedups

2) Pieter has implemented something he cals "ultraprune". Despite the name it does not prune (it lays the groundwork for that). It changes the database formats significantly, so the working set can fit entirely in RAM. This makes a massive difference, dropping block chain download time from hours to more like 20 minutes or less.

After that there are still more scalability improvements that can be made. But yes, long term, end users will run SPV clients like MultiBit and the problem will go away entirely.

[Nachtwind]

I wonder will the bitcoin development team will ever release a liteweight satoshi client which uses a cloud hosted blockchain? I think it would be a good idea at some point, as users will probably always trust the satoshi client more than a third party client like electrum.

I hope they wont put it into sort of a cloud. The Satoshi Client should be a reference implementation and nothing more/nothing less. ALso what about people who WANT to store the whole chain? I distrust a cloud more than i 'd distrust 3rd party clients..

[JompinDox]

How do they manage the wallet in a secure fashion?

Given that a decent portion of the BTC community seems to be scammers of one sort or another, how does one know that theyre safe? Are they externally validated somehow?

Can't speak for the other clients, but with Electrum (which is the one I've been using for the last few weeks), both the client and servers are fully open source, with a compact and easy to review codebase. The wallet uses very strong encryption and the private keys are always stored on your PC, not in the cloud. It also has a very active development team and a lively userbase.  

I'm not an expert, but I would say it's at least as secure as the bitcoin.org client. I haven't heard of a single security incident involving Electrum.

[btcnut]

What is an SPV client? Couldnt see that defined anywhere

[Stephen Gornick]

What is an SPV client? Couldnt see that defined anywhere

Simplified Payment Verification (SPV)

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security#Simplified_Payment_Verification_.28SPV.29