Electrum - a lightweight Bitcoin client and its server

Licence: GNU GPL v3
Author: thomasv@gitorious
Language: Python

Main features:

Client:
 * The client uses a deterministic wallet; if the wallet is lost, it can be recovered from its passphrase.
 * The client does not download the Bitcoin blockchain; it requests that information from the server
 * The client does not send its private keys to the server.
 * The client does not need to open a port, it simply polls the server for updates.

Server:
 * The server uses a patched version of the Bitcoin daemon that can forward transactions, and bitcoin-abe
 * The server code is open source. Anyone can run a server, removing single points of failure concerns.
 * The server knows which set of Bitcoin addresses belong to the same wallet, which might raise concerns about anonymity. 
However, it should be possible to write clients capable of using several servers.

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INSTALLATION

Client:  
1. install python-ecdsa and pycrypto:
   * sudo easy_install ecdsa
   * sudo easy_install pycrypto
2. run the client:
   python electrum

Server:

1. patch and recompile the bitcoin daemon - bitcoinrpc.diff
2. install bitcoin-abe : https://github.com/jtobey/bitcoin-abe
3. install bitcoinrpc : https://gitorious.org/python-bitcoin
     patch it too, see bitcoinrpc_connection.py.diff
4. launch the server:  python server.py