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If you want to transact the coins out of the wallet, then yes you need to download the blockchain. I know there are some clients that don't need the whole bloc

• yebyen 9y ago
  Why downvoted? I'm not being disingenuous, I had coins in a cold offline wallet, and it was a serious endeavor to get them out to where I could spend or cash them. I had to spend days downloading a block chain and the only thing that kept me from freaking out was that I knew this would work, having done it plenty of times when the chain was shorter. I couldn't find any way to retrieve coins from a wallet.dat without downloading the block chain first. I had thousands of dollars tied up for days while I waited. I can't imagine what it would be like when the block chain was 8x its current size, or if I had more than one cold wallet and I needed to empty all of them in any kind of a hurry (like, in time to capitalize on a bubble before it pops!)