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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

Running a full node on your laptop helps no one. They need to be permanently connected. Otherwise you should just run an SPV client.

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There's good reason to run a fully validating client. SPV clients have quite a nice usability but really fall down in the security and privacy departments. As it currently stands people using Multibit have next to no privacy for a variety of reasons. Bitcoin Core is the most secure of wallets for a number of reasons, and possibly the most private when used correctly.

There are SPV clients with HD wallets so that's not a problem inherent to all of them.

What do you mean by next to no privacy? Doesn't Multibit use bloom filters to get the relevant tx data? Is there any SPV client that does not use bloom filters to ask for tx data?

What makes SPV clients have less privacy than full nodes?

SPV clients download less data than full nodes do, by definition, therefore they must always have less privacy from remote peers. Additionally the only widely used SPV clients today (bitcoinj based wallets) set very tight Bloom filters and don't really use them for privacy purposes, for various reasons. Plus they aren't HD so reuse addresses quite often.

In git master bitcoinj is now HD and so SPV HD wallets will start appearing in the near future. Garbling Bloom filters more aggressively is tricky and will take someone doing some serious work and R&D to really nail.

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