Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) is a term used to describe software which queries other nodes for new blocks and transactions but does not store the blockchain itself, like a node.
Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) is a term used to describe software which queries other nodes for new blocks and transactions but does not store the blockchain itself, like a node. An SPV client is a form of light client described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the whitepaper. The purpose of SPV is to afford users a trust-minimized way of examining the blockchain without the inconvenience of running a node. SPV clients do trust the nodes through which they query the blockchain, but the ability to abuse this trust is extremely limited thanks to the cryptographic security of Merkle trees and the presence of other nodes.
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