Oddbean

▲ ▼

 i meant syncing the block chain (for a local wallet)

how does the wallet-only sync work? is it some kind of SPV or electrum kind of mode, where it queries a node for transactions specific to it?

▲ ▼

 You scan through everything client-side, many monero wallets do this. There is no SPV and  headers are not checked either.

▲ ▼

 So by "everything" you mean any arbitrary spam sent to you by some random guy on the internet? And you're performing something like ecdh on it to see if you're being paid?

▲ ▼

 So these "lite" wallets connect to a remote node and, query the transaction data from them through a rpc interface and scan through it on their side. They trust the remote node to speak the truth when scanning to not feed it fake transaction data. So in the worst case you might calculate a faked balance and transaction history.

▲ ▼

 Well in the worst case you use 100% until your battery dies and find nothing?

Most bip158 light wallets don't do much checking either, their worst case is limited to downloading all blocks. Which in practice also means a dead battery an no transaction history.

▲ ▼

 * 100% CPU