Say I want to start run a server which requires a bitcoin wallet to check balances, send and receive coins.
What other alternatives are there instead of downloading 70GBs of bitcoin data.
One thing that comes into my mind is to us Blockchain wallet and its API for it.
There is even example source code for it.
And if you are not comfortable to use their wallet (I wouldn't be), just watch that wallet and when a threshold amount is reached, transfer it to your main / safe wallet.