I’ll try to answer what I can:
Quote from: nixoid on June 10, 2010, 08:38:13 PM
0) Is it necessary to run a node if i want to have a wallet? Is it necessarily attached to some exact node or i can keep my wallet on flash drive for example and use it with any node? Where and in which form my account balance is stored?
You either have to run a node or trust somebody else (like MyBitcoin.com) to keep a wallet for you.
Your account balance is stored in a Berkeley DB file called ‘wallet.dat’ (what directory depends on your operating system; on my Mac it is ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/wallet.dat, on linux it is ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat, not sure about PCs).
The only application that can read wallet.dat is the bitcoin code, and the database structure isn’t documented anywhere besides the bitcoin C++ source code. Theoretically, no, but the code to do lightweight validation hasn’t been written. Satoshi is planning on encrypting the wallet database, so you’d need to enter a password to read it. (and they need to get your private keys to generate transactions— those are what are stored in the wallet.dat) Dunno. There’s another thread about this in these forums; maybe we should start a “Satoshi’s TODO list” thread and get folks to volunteer to help out. Fewer and fewer coins will be created over the next N years (where N is— what, 20?). That’s a feature, not a bug…
RE: developing your own version: are you thinking of creating a second bitcoin implementation that is compatible with the existing C++ one (good idea, in my opinion)? Or creating a similar-but-not-the-same system (bad idea, in my opinion)?