[Bitcoin-development] Bitcoind-in-background mode for SPV wallets

[Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com>]

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Hello,

This is primarily aimed at developers of SPV wallets.

The recently reported decrease in number of full nodes could have several
reasons, one of them that less people are running Bitcoin Core for the
wallet because the other wallets are getting ahead in both features and
useability.

It's great to see innovation in wallets, but it's worrying that the number
of full nodes decreases.

It may be that lots of people would support the network by running a full
node, but don't want to go through the trouble of installing bitcoin core
separately (and get confused because it's a wallet, too).

Hence I'd like to explore the idea of adding an option to popular SPV
wallets, to spin a bitcoind process in the background. This could be pretty
much transparent to the user - it would sync in the background, the wallet
could show statistics about the node, but is not dependent on it.

In exchange the user would get increased (full node level) security, as the
SPV wallet would have a local trusted node.

Does this sound like a good idea?

Is there any way that Bitcoin Core can help to accomedate this 'embedded'
usage? Specific Interfaces, special builds - maybe add a walletless
bitcoind build to gitian - bindings, dlls, etc?

Wladimir

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