Apart from the official client found at the bitcoin.org site what is the list of alternative bitcoin clients? And what OS do they work on?
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As far as I know the official client is currently the only client capable of doing full transaction validation. (BitcoinJ, libbitcoin, and Armory don't do full validation. Some other clients rely on bitcoind or the partially-validating clients.)– theymosCommented Feb 23, 2012 at 16:44
2 Answers
There is a current list of clients here http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Clients
There is development discussion around alternative clients here http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=37.0
Currently the "Official Client" (more specifically, the Satoshi client) is the most widely used and has implementations that run on Windows, OS X, and Linux. However, multiple alternative clients have been developed, including ones that run on Android, and this is currently a high priority for the bitcoin community.
The current most popular alternative clients are BitcoinJ, written in java http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/
and BitDroid, which runs on Android https://github.com/cdecker/BitDroid-Network
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I upvoted this but I feel it's worth noting that BitcoinJ and BitDroid aren't really "clients" per se - more like engines. I know technically they satisfy the criteria in the same way that bitcoind.exe does, but when most folks say "clients" they're probably expecting a fully functioning app with a GUI. Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 1:23
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yes, that is very true. Perhaps worth noting that they are still more suitable for developers to build GUIs and other features around than useful on their own for the average user at this point. Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 16:46
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1I found this site which has an alternative client multibit.org– kirianCommented Oct 7, 2011 at 21:48
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The list of current clients is quite useless. It does not say which clients are desktop versions, etc and some links are dead– Jus12Commented Nov 11, 2012 at 16:21
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yes someone should submit a new answer, or re-ask the question and answer it. Unfortunately, lots of questions like these are going to be time-limited in the bitcoin world. Commented Nov 13, 2012 at 8:03