Technically, you don’t need to sync the chain at all to create a wallet. Synching the chain only becomes relevant once you transact. As mentioned by nostr:nprofile1qqsvxkhtrgywqapdnw3qrmzun2hmy9awa9te9r9cckku2ylpmatwk5qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhs8raf6e some wallets allow to sync only pa...

Its an event sourced database. The state it’s trying to reconstruct is the state of all of the balances for every unspent transaction output (utxo). This state is called the utxo set. For your node to know if a payment to you is valid, it needs to be able to verify if an output paying you *actual...

Yes, but you wouldn’t be able to verify whether the chain you are looking at is valid. Therefore you can not “safely” receive

Yes, this is still bad UX. I wish we had more compact-block-filter-based wallets, those sync only for a few minutes initially. E.g. Ginger wallet works like this.

You don't have to sync the entire Bitcoin blockchain. You can run a pruned node which means you download just the last xxxx blocks. Normally okay but you can get issues when you run a deeper wallet. Also if you want to restore an older wallet with a pruned node it will. not find any transactions.

This is the exact usecase for assumeutxo. You can use it in Bitcoin Core v29 but it's not the most user friendly experience.

you can just generate an address and check it on mempool.space

How does your wallet verify that a tx sent to your wallet is valid? How does it know the inputs in the tx are in the UTXO set if it hasn’t verified the whole blockchain?

The purpose of syncing and verifying the chain is to (without trust) read the global state, ie the utxo set. If you don't care about showing the balance of your new wallet, then you can delay syncing, sure.

To inculcate virtue of patience :-) .. what is the hurry 😂

#btcfail

Why not just use a reputable wallet app until you can sync your own #Bitcoin / #BTC node? 💁‍♂️ You can always just open that wallet once the sync is complete, or send it to a fresh wallet you make after the sync. 🤙

The real answer is likely "because it didn't seem like such a big deal 900,000 blocks ago."

If only there was a fork of Bitcoin core that meets your requirements...

Depends on the wallet. You can easily create a paper wallet and send to it without any knowledge of the blocks history. You can also verify via a block explorer that btc had arrived to your wallet. You can also spend it without the full chain by creating a transaction offline and then broadcasting i...