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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Mark Friedenbach <mark at monetize.io> wrote:
> (2) there's a reasonable pathway to doing this all in-protocol, so there's
> no reason to introduce external dependencies.

Not just a speculative pathway. Pieter implemented headers first:
https://github.com/sipa/bitcoin/tree/headersfirst  and it was
everything we hoped it would be— it easily can saturate residential
broadband, produces less load hot-spotting, copes with unreliable
peers, etc. It's now just slowly making its way into Bitcoin core.