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Multibit-Legacy / multibit-hd

Deprecated Bitcoin Wallet
https://multibit.org/blog/2017/07/26/multibit-shutdown.html
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Possibility for network synchronization service? #865

Open KroniK907 opened 8 years ago

KroniK907 commented 8 years ago

This is a feature request

Would it be possible to have an optional service which keeps MultiBit synchronized with the network at all times? It can be a pain to open my wallet after a month or so and have to wait a long time for the network synchronization to occur. It would also be much easier on my bandwidth limits if I could just continuously keep up with the network rather than downloading the info in large chunks once every few months when I needed to access my wallet.

Thank you

jim618 commented 8 years ago

Hi KroniK907, With MultiBit HD everything is stored encrypted on disk which is why you need to enter your wallet password before wallet sync starts. Thus any background process would have to know your password and keep all the wallets (permanently) opened and decrypted in memory. This would be a bit of a security hole.

KroniK907 commented 8 years ago

I see. Why is the local blockchain information stored in an encrypted format, besides wanting to keep all of multibit and its resources encrypted for general security? Is there a security reason for, specifically, keeping the local blockchain information encrypted?

jim618 commented 8 years ago

The blockchain information (things like headers and checkpoints) aren't encrypted for the reasons you state. It's all on the blockchain and public.

The data that IS encrypted is:

Because the Bitcoin addresses in your wallet are encrypted these must be decrypted before you can perform a sync (as you need to know which addresses to look for transactions for).

With MultiBit Classic only private keys were encrypted but for HD we decided to encrypt all user data for 'post-Snowden' reasons.