On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 5:41 PM, Natanael <natanael.l@gmail.com> wrote:

This could probably be done fairly easily by bundling Stratum (it's
not just for pools!) and allowing SPV wallets to ask Bitcoind to start
it (if you don't use it, there's no need to waste the resources), and
then connect to it. The point of using Stratum is that it already is
being used by Electrum, and that it might be an easier way to support
SPV clients than creating a new API in bitcoind for it since Stratum
itself already relies on bitcoind to provide it's services.

Why would a new API be needed? (beside maybe some functionality that would make it easier to integrate)

P2P should be enough for SPV clients such as BitcoinJ to get access to (filtered) blocks and transations, and RPC can be used to manage/query the bitcoind instance. I'm not sure what stratum would add.

Wladimir