Block Quote: 823776

'Simplified Payment Verification is for lightweight client-only users who only do transactions and don't generate and don't participate in the node network.  They wouldn't need to download blocks, just the hash chain, which is currently about 2MB and very quick to verify (less than a second to verify the whole chain).  If the network becomes very large, like over 100,000 nodes, this is what we'll use to allow common users to do transactions without being full blown nodes.  At that stage, most users should start running client-only software and only the specialist server farms keep running full network nodes, kind of like how the usenet network has consolidated. 
SPV is not implemented yet, and won't be implemented until far in the future, but all the current implementation is designed around supporting it.' May 18, 2010 - Satoshi Nakamoto