Re: Can I receive bit coin as soon as I download a wallet?
There are other option available in the future. Including, but not limited to, simply including a recent copy of the blockchain in each new client release to be downloaded directly rather than over the p2p network and verified by each client upon first start. It's the verification process that takes most of the time, not the actual downloading.
If they do decide to include the database they better hope it compresses well. My data directory for bitcoin is at 1.8GB and growing. That's only with 131340 blocks AND an empty wallet that has not yet made any transactions. Who knows how big it will be in five years
The other option involves pruning of the blockchain's spent transactions, which is already in the protocol, but not yet safely implimented into the client. That is why transactions are stored in a merkle hash tree instead of just a flat file with all the transactions hashed once. The merkle hash tree permits spent transactions to be deleted from the local blockchain without disrupting the verification of other transactions in the same block yet unspent. The only part of the blockchain that must continue to exist is the headers, which weigh in at 80 bytes exactly for each block. Roughly 4 megs per year.