Author: Jeff Garzik 2015-08-11 15:46:25
Published on: 2015-08-11T15:46:25+00:00
The Bitcoin Core wallet hasn't been given much focus in recent times, with development moving towards SPV, thin clients and centralized web middleware. Jonas Schnelli suggested that running a full node wallet could be more user-friendly if some changes were made to the current concept. He proposed enabling pruning by default, offering flexible CPU usage, throttling block download bandwidth, participating in SPV during catch up, disabling bloom filtering, and switching from SPV to full validation when the node is in sync. Schnelli believes this approach would increase the number of participating full nodes while giving users more privacy and security, creating a counterweight against SPV/thin clients, slowly completing full validation and increasing privacy, and avoiding wallet development centralization, which could be helpful once/if attacks against SPV/thin clients become real. He acknowledged that his solution may not work on a smartphone due to bandwidth and CPU usage constraints, but he believes it could work for groups of people who trust each other. Schnelli has been working towards this direction for about a year and is currently developing a wallet-focused Bitcoin Core fork. His long-term goal is to decouple the wallet and core by using Bitcoin Core as a library for the wallet side. He invited other developers to join the team by reviewing, criticizing concepts, or contributing code via GitHub.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:12:07.973938+00:00