Re: [Bitcoin-development] Plans to separate wallet from core

[Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Jorge Timón <jtimon@monetize.io> wrote:
> On 6/24/14, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
ou did want to separate the wallet code from the full node then that'd be
>> the way to do it.
>
> Exactly, this is part of my point, the qt-wallet does not support SPV
> operation at this point, and that complex work should be done after
> the wallet is separated. Thus the first version of the separated
> wallet should be functionally equivalent to today's wallet, that is, a
> full node wallet (even though I understand Wladimir's arguments
> against full-node wallets).

Do mind that some of the steps on the path of bitcoind towards SPV are
also useful in general. For example, headers-first allows parallel
block download, which would solve a lot of sync issues people are
having - a much higher priority than the wallet.

But anyhow I'm describing how I would do it. If you're going to do it,
you can do it in any order that you want. As we're talking about a
separate project here it's not even clear who will be maintainer.

> 2) That doesn't necessarily mean that optionally maintaining
> additional indexes in the core is not interesting for some use cases
> (interesting for bitcoind, I don't care much if electrum-server
> currently does this and more [with more dependencies]). Although
> Pieter thinks that should also be separated into an "index node" too,
> but I think that's another discussion.

I don't understand your argument against Electrum here. Dependencies?
Come on, that's a matter of software distribution. If that really
bothers you I suppose you could contribute to Electrum server so that
it has less deps. It doesn't make the protocol worth any less.

Although Pieter and I disagree with regard to issue #4351, we agree on
wanting to keep (or at least making) bitcoind as lean as possible.
Maintaining extra indices for others doesn't fit in there - that's
also why the address index patch was not merged. An 'index node' could
be a different animal.

Wladimir