user11136: I want to start playing around a bit with the technical side of Bitcoins (thinking of setting up an exchange). So I built a bitcoind (daemon) binary from source and now the docs say that when I run that, it will start downloading the blockchain, which is several GBs large and takes a couple hours.
The only thing I want to do however, is create a simple wallet and make transactions from and to it. And because I ultimately want to deploy this to a server, I would prefer to not download several GBs. 
So do I really need to download the whole blockchain in order to get a simple bitcoin wallet? Or is there a smarter way than deploying a wallet on a server using the bitcoin daemon?

user4708: There are "lightweight" wallets, such as Electrum and mobile wallets, that do not require the blockchain to run.  In exchange for this convenience however, their users rely on a centralized server (or servers) to host the blockchain, which is a bit of a security compromise.
bitcoind is the "Satoshi client" and is not a lightweight wallet.  It won't work without the blockchain.

11136: <p>I want to start playing around a bit with the technical side of Bitcoins (thinking of setting up an exchange). So I built a bitcoind (daemon) binary from source and now the docs say that when I run that, it will start downloading the blockchain, which is several GBs large and takes a couple hours.</p>

<p>The only thing I want to do however, is create a simple wallet and make transactions from and to it. And because I ultimately want to deploy this to a server, I would prefer to not download several GBs. </p>

<p>So do I really need to download the whole blockchain in order to get a simple bitcoin wallet? Or is there a smarter way than deploying a wallet on a server using the bitcoin daemon?</p>
 4708: <p>There are "lightweight" wallets, such as Electrum and mobile wallets, that do not require the blockchain to run.  In exchange for this convenience however, their users rely on a centralized server (or servers) to host the blockchain, which is a bit of a security compromise.</p>

<p>bitcoind is the "Satoshi client" and is not a lightweight wallet.  It won't work without the blockchain.</p>
