Nice, I just started looking into Dogecoin a few days ago. It's been two days now and my wallet is still doing its first sync (about 70%). I also set up a BitCoin wallet and it looks like that'll take weeks to sync. Is this a problem people starting crypto currencies are thinking about? Is it solvable or just how they work?
You can use a wallet like Electrum (https://electrum.org/) for Bitcoin. You don't need to download the entire blockchain then. You can be up and running in the time it takes to install it. And it is still a local wallet, so you don't have to trust an online service to store your wallet.
I suspect that every user running a full node is going to become a bigger problem as time goes by. Newer Bitcoin clients remove the requirement by communicating with a full node somewhere in the cloud and only storing the most recent transactions (a full node hosts the entire history of the currency; every transaction ever made).
Dogecoin has tremendous transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin some days, because of it's tipping culture. So, it's probably more urgent that solutions to the full-node problem get solved for more popular altcoins like Doge than for the less used ones.
When you're using an offline wallet like bitcoin-qt or dogecoin-qt, you have to download the entire blockchain for the cryptocurrency. This is what's 'syncing' and can take a while to finish.
You can bypass having to download the blockchain by using an online wallet instead, which solves that specific pain point but they're less secure than your local storage offline wallet.
Please, do not recommend that. Online wallets are first target for scams and hacks and should not be used.
If you browse /r/dogecoin, you will see that everyone is recommending to stay away from them. They were especially hit by the dogewallet.com hack.
An alternative is using the android wallet. It's been around for some weeks, now, and I didn't see any complains about it. It relies on no central server and it's code is opensource [1], so it can hardly be a scam, I think.
I remember reading something by its author saying that it won't download the whole chain. From my experience, it's faster to sync than qt client, so I suppose it's true. Also, some neat options like disabling sync when not charging and/or not connected to wifi, which make power / bandwidth consumption not a problem.
Anyway, the only official wallet is the qt / cli one [2]. If you want to be safe, it's the one to use. The sync thing may be annoying at first, but it's easily dealt with if you open your wallet once a day, or once in two days (it will take something like five minutes to sync).
