[sp332]

It takes a lot of bandwidth to verify the blockchain initially, but you don't have to store it all. Once you see that an input has been spent, you can discard the earlier transactions without losing information about the current balances. So you'd only need a few hundred MB of storage space.

[towelguy]

This is interesting, I thought in order to use a fully independent client you needed to store the whole blockchain. Which clients support this?

[sp332]

Most of what's needed for this has been in the main/Satoshi client since 2012. The client uses the pruned chain for most transactions because it's faster, and just uses the full blockchain for syncing with other clients. But I don't know of any clients that turn off the full-blockchain part and use only the pruned one. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119525.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118660.msg1285690#ms...