On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Thomas Hartman
<thomas@???> wrote:
> On second though...
>
> "In particular, iiuc, satoshi does not require wallet.dat file for
> signing, privkeys can all be passed on command line. (Need to verity
> this, but it seems to me from reading docs.)"
>
> It looks like this is not true. You can't really do *anything* with
> satoshi client without downloading the blockchain. Which sort of
> sucks.

It is true. You don't need a wallet. The raw-transactions API will
work if you run bitcoind in disable-wallet mode, or have compiled
without wallet.

Bitcoind *does* always download the block chain, but that is because
the purpose of Bitcoin Core is to maintain the P2P infrastructure. For
better or worse, serving a copy of the block chain is the only way to
do that at this point.

It would of course be possible to split off the pure-function RPC
calls that rely on neither the block chain or the wallet, but then it
could be just as well a client-side library, no point in using RPC at
all.

Wladimir