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Does every new user have to download the entire blockchain? That's a point I'm not really clear on.

• Karunamon 14y ago
  When you first start up your client, yes. From then on it's just kept in sync with the network. It was around a gigabyte back in January.
• Rovanion 14y ago
  If you are hosting your own wallet and not using an online solution yes.
  • joezydeco 14y ago
    Do you know of an online wallet that seems to be reputable? I'm looking at Coinbase at the moment.
    • Rovanion 14y ago
      Blockchain.info is quite popular. That's really all I know.
• Tuna-Fish 14y ago
  If you run a full client, yes. It is perfectly possible to not do this, but doing so requires that you trust someone (the one running the client for you).
• yk 14y ago
  Currently yes ( with the official client). But this is not a requirement of the system. Theoretically you can announce transactions without looking at the block chain, but then you do not know how much BTCs are in your account. There is another optimization, the block chain consists of an Merkle tree, such that you can verify the block chain without storing all the previous blocks. In this case you still need to download all blocks, but you only need to store ~ 80 Bytes per block. [1] [1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf