Clients

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Revision as of 09:18, 2 August 2012 by Justmoon (talk | contribs) (Transposed table switching rows and columns, see talk page "Orientation".)
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This table compares the features of the different clients.

Feature key

Wallet Security
How well the client protects your private keys from people with access to the machine the wallet is stored on. The private keys can be encrypted, for example.
Network Security
Clients which more fully implement the Bitcoin network protocol are safer -- they can't be as easily tricked by powerful attackers. A client which fully implements the protocol will always use the correct block chain and will never allow double-spends or invalid transactions to exist in the block chain under any circumstances. Clients which only partially implement the protocol typically trust that 50% or more of the network's mining power is honest. Some clients trust one or more remote servers to protect them from double-spends and other network attacks.
Setup Time
Some clients require that you download and verify a large amount of data before you can send or receive BTC.
Maturity
When the project was started.

Table

Client Get Started Audience Wallet Security Network Security Backups Setup Time Disk Space Maturity License Multi-user Available for
Armory Download Power users Encryption Addon One-time Varies 2+ GB Jul 2011 AGPLv3 Multi-wallet
Bitcoin Wallet Download End-users Isolated Partial Manual 1 hour 30 MB Mar 2011 GPLv3 No
Bitcoin-Qt Download End-users Encryption Full Manual Hours 2+ GB May 2011 MIT No
bitcoind Download Programmers Encryption Full Manual Hours 2+ GB Aug 2009 MIT Virtual accounts
Electrum Download Power users Encryption Minimal Memorized Minutes 5 MB Nov 2011 GPLv3 No
MultiBit Download End-users None Partial No 1 hour 50 MB Jul 2011 MIT Multi-wallet
My Wallet eWallet Everyone Encryption Remote Automatic Minutes None Dec 2011 BSD* Yes