Bitcoin Forum

I have redownload my wallet of BTC since a few weeks.
The download of my bitcoin wallet took a few days. In the beginning that went very fast, but the last years that had to be downloaded went very slowly.
Since about two weeks my wallet was completely downloaded and up to date.
But now every 2 - 3 days i try to download the last blocks.
It takes however almost 1 hour or even more to download a day.
Is that normal?

Yes, that is normal, especially for older/slower computers.

Yes it is, normally, half of the units loads fast for 2-3 days, but the second part can loaded for a long time,
I don't think that because of the weakness of iron, I think because of netconnect in the first place

My computer is about 6 years old. So that can be a reason.
I'm thinking of buying a new one in the next future. So it can be that the download goes than faster if i have a more powerful computer.
I had this problem only for my BTC wallet.
My dogecoin wallet and Litecoin wallet went much faster. I have no others at this moment. My dogecoin wallet was downloaded in 2 days i think and the Litecoin wallet went faster in one day i think.
Is that because these wallets are more recent than the BTC wallet perhaps?

No. It's because they have fewer transactions on their respective block chains. Fewer transactions means less data for your computer to process during the sync process.

I begin to understand. So it is because 1 a block of BTC there are much more transactions than in a block of LTC for example. Because of the amounts of BTC are much smaller than an another coin.
The dat.file of BTC in my map roaming is indeed much bigger than in my LTC or DOGE map.
Thanks for the info.

One of my older laptop tooks well over a week to download the enitre blockchain, must have cost a few quid in electric ha.

Download speed mainly factors on two things. Download speed and how fast your computer can process this. Being 6 years old, you can expect lag and frequent crashes. Where do you live? What's your average mb/s?

I would highly recommend NOT storing your bitcoins on an old computer. Despite if there's no lag, a 6 year old computer's hard drive could fail at a any given moment. If you don't have a newer computer, or a secure phone to store your bitcoin on, I'd highly recommend blockchain.info. But if you don't hold that much bitcoin, i'd highly recommend coinbase.

I always keep a copy of the blockchain for new and reformatted computers and hard drives. I keep mine on USB sticks and update once every month or three, plus I backup clone my hard drives so there are copies on those backups as well.

'fraid so
Running a full node and wallet bitcoin-qt is now quite a big undertaking.  2GB memory and 2 or more cores is the smallest I'd recommend, with >> the present requirement of 60 GB storage.  No download limits are also a must-have, as I've just gone through 12GB of downloads for presumably a previous week of blockchain data.  Interestingly, the stored blockchain grew by much less than that.

Full node wallets for many new and underused altcoins are still fast and <<GB because there are less transactions in their histories.

If you want to contribute a full node to the bitcoin network (even if it is only on 8h a day) then your new PC would probably be useful.  If it is like my quad-core i5 then it might speed things up a lot but keep your existing one for now as my i5 did not like 0.11.0 and is presently not synched.


If you just want quick synch and bitcoin dealings then I'd recommend trying out an electrum wallet.  You don't know whose full node it got its data from, but it will do your bitcoin transactions and storage.  Those run on anything;  raspberryPi for example.

I've downloaded the full blockchain on a few occasions on different computers, one was as recently as last week.

It took around 3 days to download the whole thing but the computer wasn't on continuosly so it wasn't exactly 72 hours.

The first few years of blocks are pretty quick to sync but the most recent say 2 years is very slow for obvious reasons.

Just have patience & get on it with, Bitcoin Core is great to run & very safe if your PC is clean, it's a must imo.

Yeah today my sync broke with no reason for the second time. Probably because my computer needed to restart.

Im download now since 6 hrs with my 25Mbit internet. It takes foreeever.

Just check your CPU usage, it is always 100%. I think this has something to do with those dust transactions that was flooding the network during the spam attacks

http://photo.mystisland.org/worstcase.png

If a single block took 30 seconds to clear on a mining pool server (Which should be running on very high end hardware), then on legacy hardware it would take minutes to clear

This is also the reason 8MB blocks would never work, if you had just a serials of these kind of block at size of 8MB, nodes will never be able to catch up with the network for days, the whole network will fall apart

I have never downloaded/used Core because of this, I just don't have the space or bandwidth to even try it, I wonder how many people would use bitcoin if this was compulsory and there wasn't any alternatives such as Electrum etc. I don't think there would be many and this is why I think there should be some incentives for people who run the full nodes and provide services such as electrum servers.

I have faced similar issues in the past and I will do a brief research and a case study for the reason why Bitcoin wallet takes such a long time to download and soon I will come with a solution but I think installing some supporting files may speed up the process, just give me sometime I will come back with a solution for this.

This morning i had a problem with my computer.
SUddenly he was blocked and i couldn't type anything anymore.
So i did reset of my computer. At that moment the download of the last day of my BTC wallet was working, but as everything was blocked i had to do the reset.
When i restarted my computer and opened the link to my BTC wallet i had to restart the download of the blocks all over. So i'm again busy for a week or so.
Is there a way to prevent this when the computer blocks?

No need. The client automatically downloads and verifies simultaneously from various nodes. This makes it much faster than torrenting bootstrap.dat. The reason that it is slow can be due to your CPU, disk I/O, network speed. It is most commonly your CPU that is the bottleneck.
No. You need to shut the client down safely before your computer.

I always shot the client down before is stop my computer.
But this morning my computer was blocked. I couldn't change from any program, any webpage, ...
The mouse of my computer stayed fixed at the same place.
I have been waiting for at least half an hour, and nothing changed on my computer. I couldn't do anything anymore.
So i used the "reset" button and when my computer started up again, i could open again everything.
BUt when i opened my BTC wallet i got an error on the blockchain and had to restart the download of the 6 years ... weeks again.
Again a work for a week or so.
Is there a way that you can recover your BTC wallet for the last date you downloaded the blocks.
I have a backup of my wallet and there i see the transactions and the amount i have in my wallet, but they will appear clear when the date of the blocks are coming in.

Its very unlikely that you actually redownloaded the data. After a crash the data often has to be rescanned though, which can take some time depending on your machine. IIRC after a power outage a while back it took me a day or so to rescan all the data on a 4. Gen i5.

If you assume this happens regularly you can avoid this by doing regular backups of the entire bitcoin core data directory. This will however eat up disk space.

If you want to move to a different wallet the best way to do this is to sync up once more and transfer all coins once to a new wallet afterwards.

I'll suggest separating the functions of wallet and full node.
It is some bother to get set up this way, but once done you have a fast synch wallet such as Electrum and if a jumbo jet falls out of the sky and blows up your good computer, then you only need to remember a bad poem or wallet seed to get at your coins again.

Meanwhile, if you want to know that your Electrum fast wallet is looking at your own electrum-server which is looking at your own bitcoin-qt or bitcoind full node, you can set it up to do those two functions.  If you are not doing a full node then the fast wallets still work, you just don't always know whose copy of the blockchain the wallet refers to.

This makes babysitting more than a week of bitcoin-qt -rescan unimportant for your day to day BTC dealings.

That's a good suggestion.
I will do it so in the future.
My computer is about 6 years old as well and doesn't work very fast i think.
Next year i had the plan to buy a new (and faster one).
Thanks for helping.

I can update you.  "is that normal" is still a yes.
My older twin-core 1.9GHz PC with 2GB of RAM took 22 hours to update from three weeks ago, averaging about one day worth of transactions per hour of synchronising.
The size of the /.bitcoin/ is presently <58GB

What I don't know is why it works at all with my home router having a port redirect to my other "good" computer, not this one.