Bitcoin Forum

I wonder how easy is for a regular Joe to get the bitcoin core wallet and just sync with the blockchain on average machine?

I know there are wallets like Electrum and Armory and zillions of online wallets around the internet, but if someone find bitcoin download the software and start it up, how would his experience be?

Depends on what you want to do with Core. If you just want to have a copy of the whole blockchain on your machine, then go and get Core as your wallet. There are a lot of features embedded in the Core wallet that isn't available on other wallets, most especially SPV wallets. Core wallet is used mostly for running a full node to help support the network. If you are the type that only sends and receives bitcoin and do not involve in any other technicalities in bitcoin (such as, well running a full node), just get a SPV wallet.

about as easy as downloading Call of duty or battlefied or world of warcraft..
as they take about the sametime (many GB) to download fully.. then you have the fun of playing around and learning how to use it..

Really it is as easy to sync the wallet?

For me, It has taken more than one week to sync wallet for other altcoins. I understand that with so many bitcoin transactions you need to maintain the wallet open to keep up with it.

The main problem in my opinion is to download the whole blockchain to be able to let him start using the wallet

Using is his problem, and not downloading and syncing the whole wallet up-to-date. Like what I've said earlier, the core wallet has many functionalities that isn't present on any SPV wallets available. It will take OP some time before he finds his way about how to use Core wallet.

It is quite easy to use Bitcoin Core as a normal user. The only problems people run into are syncing the blockchain and change addresses. Most newbies panic when they see in a block explorer that their change is going to a change address (but one they don't recognize). Syncing the blockchain can also take an insane amount of time.

Yeah It is pretty easy just first ignore some of the technicality. You will get it in time  ;D

isn't running the Core wallet as easy as download and just running the program 24/7

i think whole blockchain's size will be nearly 40 GB if i'm not wrong.

It's much easier to use electrum or some other SPV wallet to get started, but core has a friendlier interface IMO.

Bitcoin core is easy to use. But we need patience until the initial network synchronizations. Many newbies go for light wallets for this reasons. If you have higher bandwidth along with high data limit then bitcoin core is the right choice.

is not about how easy is to download and sync it, is about your patience, since download the whole blockchain will take you few days ( if you connection is "normal" )

download, install and wait until blockchain is downloaded is like download any other programs for your machine, so as i said that's not the problem.

In terms of functionality the core and other wallets will be almost the same but it's waiting time for it to sync that actually makes the difference. Even not accessing it for a week will take time to have it fully synced. That's what happened to me.

Bitcoin Core can also be pretty user unfriendly on your machine, of course depending on how old and how powerful your computer is. I have two older laptops and I was running a Core on one of them since I really wanted to help the network with running a full node.

First it took over a week to download (and blockchain was even smaller then). My computer was screaming and heating up. I thought it will stop once the blockchain downloads, but even when it synced completely, my computer was unusable. So I ditched all of this and downloaded Electrum.

As for OP's experience, it really just depends how strong your computer is and how good is your Internet connection.

Positive sides:
*He keeps his own security. No need to share private keys with 3rd party clients.
*Click download and install, easy to use.

Negative sides:
*Too much space required in hard drive
*Too long to download and sync (confirm blocks) blockchain (at least 4 days for now)

also don't forget about electric cost ( if you want to support bitcoin network and run nodes 24/7) and don't forget about internet cost, because you will download 49gb

It's easy you just have to wait for the entire blocchain which can take hours even days. For the average joe I would just use a lite client.

not difficult, but you need a powerful ssd to sync faster like evo/840/850 pro and 50gb of free space + future free space, so i would recommend 256-512GB ssd

the rest is just a matter of one click to run the client

I'm currently downloading the whole blockchain on a PC which I will use solely for bitcoin. It's got over 2 years left of blocks. Very frustrating but I knew the amount of time it would take from a quick bit of research.

wrost part about bitcoin core for a normal user is big blockchain size, they need to download over 20GB blockchain data for bitcoin core
but if you have fast internet connection then its easy for you, you can use this on normal dualcore/i3 PC with 4gb ram