Trustless
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An example of a lightweight client happily accepting a fake transaction. If the attacker had some hashpower then this transaction could be made to have
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too.
Running a full node as your
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is the only way to know for sure that none of bitcoin's rules have been broken. Rules like no coins were spent not belonging to the owner, that no coins were spent twice, that no inflation happens outside of the schedule and that all the rules needed to make the system work are trinc (e.g.
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.) All other kinds of wallet involve trusting a third party server.
If bitcoin is digital gold, then a full node wallet is your own personal goldsmith who checks for you that received payments are genuine. You wouldn't accept a cash banknote or gold coin without checking it is genuine, the same applies for bitcoin.
Security
All these checks done by full nodes also increase the security. There are many attacks possible against lightweight wallets that do not affect full node wallets.
This is not just mindless paranoia, there have been real world examples where full node users were unaffected by turmoil in the rest of the bitcoin ecosystem. The 4th July 2015 accidental chain fork effected many kinds of wallets. Here is the wiki page on this event
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Notice how node software updated months ago was completely unaffected by the fork. All other wallets required either extra
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or checking that the third-party institution was running the correct version. A bitcoin business, like an exchange, marketplace or online store should always use a full node for security.
Privacy
Full nodes wallets are also currently the most private way to use Bitcoin, with nobody else learning which bitcoin
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belong to you. All other
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leak information about which
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are yours because they must query third-party servers. The Electrum servers will know which
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belong to you and can link them together. Despite
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, lightweight wallets based on
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do not provide much privacy against nodes who connected directly to the wallet or wiretappers.
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For some use cases, such privacy may not be required. But an important reason to run a full node and use it as a wallet is to get the full privacy benefits.