Hi! I would like to set up a local wallet at my computer, which runs as a daemon. However, the blockchain takes ages to download and every single day it takes quite a lot of time to update the receiving transactions.

Is there a way to use Bitcoind in a "light mode" and avoid so much cpu/disk usage?


  • An upcoming release of the Bitcoin client (likely to be v0.8) will resolve most of your concerns with this as it has an overhauled approach to how the blockchain data is stored and accessed. – Stephen Gornick Jan 31 '13 at 2:30

I don't think Simplified Payment Verification (SPV or "light mode") is available in the reference client. There are plans to implement it in the development going on in the discussion email list though.

However, you could download the source code for MultiBit and then use that as a starting point for your own daemon. Alternatively, just use the underlying BitcoinJ library which offers some example tools that probably do what you want right out of the box.



bitcoind now supports pruning (i.e. not keeping the entire blockchain).

However, this is different from SPV, since it still fully validates all transactions.

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