Quote from: BenCousins on November 09, 2012, 09:12 pmyes well my bitcoins wont show up until the whole blockchain has loaded correct? and i cant resend them until they show up?BCI don't mean to patronize you or anything like that man, but I think you may have it a little wrong. The BTC aren't actually being "received" by your wallet. What's really going on is that the entire Bitcoin network is notified that a new transaction has taken place, and records the source, destination, and amount basically. Everybody has that information. If you're running a bitcoin-qt, your copy of the blockchain gets that info too. But you don't even have to be running the program to "receive" the BTC you sent to your address.You could send it from some random internet cafe to an address you know your wallet.dat (the file that represents all of your bitcoin addresses and the secret keys that let you make transactions from those addresses) contains, and walk away for two decades. When you launched your bitcoin client and loaded up that wallet.dat file 20 years from the day you sent your BTC to your address, you'd have them. Even though your wallet hadn't even been "opened" or connected to the internet for 20 years.So basically, no. You do not need the blockchain for your bitcoins to show up. That's the whole idea to the Bitcoin network -- everybody records the transaction and decides whether it's valid or not, and if you made a legitimate transaction, everybody will record that you received your BTC (the confirmations take some time as you know, but the transaction gets confirmed with or without you).That's why your wallet.dat is the magic key you don't ever want to lose. It has the private keys that let you make a transaction from your bitcoin address(es). If you lose that, you never get the BTC back. Nobody does. They sit there associated with that address until the earth crumbles or quantum computers brute force the secret key in a century.Edit: ohhh, I get you now. Yeah. YOUR client won't actually list the BTC as being there for you to send or make a transaction with until your client finishes synching the blockchain. But you can just export the secret key in the client you're using, then import it into any Bitcoin wallet you want. Blockchain.info's wallet, instawallet, whatever -- they should all support importing a secret key. From that key they'll know how to make transactions from the associated public bitcoin address (and the public address is known from the secret key, so you don't have to import that or anything).