Bitcoin Forum

Right now the use of bitcoin has a huge barrier of entry in the amount of time it takes to synch with the network. I've been trying for nearly 2 days now and it seems at this point i'm constantly 10k away from being verified and i had to move my bitcoin folder out of my C partition because it was using up the last 2 gigs i had left on it. Won't synching take even longer and even more space as bitcoin becomes more popular?

all it takes is leaving your wallet offline for 24 hours and upon starting the program it indeed takes forever. I think that you are right though, as more blocks are mined syncing will take longer. That is if your that far behind.

There are clients that don't require the blockchain. Electrum comes to mind. You can make a dynamic link and move the bitcoin folder to a drive of your choice if your C:\ drive is full. There's a thread on here somewhere with the commands to make the link. Try the search box or google.

Electrum does not download the blockchain, so there's no real syncing concerns to worry about. MultiBit is my favorite since I personally like the design and features of it better. To my understanding, it only downloads part of the chain, so syncing only about a minute (I've never had it take more than two at the very most).

Both are great options, and they eliminate the barrier of entry. ;)

I've already moved the bitcoin folder.

Thanks for the information. I guess rather than a barrier, this is just a hurdle.

So what you're essentially saying is that the client i'm using at the moment will be practically useless in continuum?

is there a fast way to transfer wallets from the bitcoin client to multibit? at the rate bitcoin is catching up, it is perpetually 10k away from present and i don't see any real way i can actually transfer the btc out.

It's not necessarily useless. From my understanding, the syncing process isn't as bad once the blockchain is finally downloaded. It just takes a long time for the first time.

I don't know how compatible the wallet files are between the two programs. You'd need someone with more technical knowledge to answer that for you. All I can think of is to send the BTC from your old client to an address in the new one, but there might be an easier way to do it that I'm unaware of.

It depends on what you want to do.  If you want to mine then there isn't a need to even touch the blockchain.  Yes it can take a while to download ~3 years of records, however the size shouldn't be more than a couple GB.  If you just want to mine, I would suggest signing up for an online wallet on Blockchain.info (please make sure to use some type of 2 factor authentication on all sites where applicable - you can either buy a Yubikey or use the free Google Auth application if you have an iOS or Android device) and find a mining pool that meets your needs (I would recommend either Slush's Pool or OzCoin).

I've run through the gamut of clients and I love Multibit. I leave the reference client running on a home server to act as a good node, but my laptop travels too much for the bitcoin-qt/armory combination to work for me any more. I can't wait for 0.8 release and BitcoinJ (the Multibit backend) to get deterministic and encrypted wallets. I'd have so many strong client choices.

Well, i guess i'll just have to start over, because i'm perpetually stuck at 9223 blocks remaining. goodbye, .002 BTC...

You can extract your private key along with your Bitcoin address and move it to a different client, such as MultiBit.  More information here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110342.0).

Fire up MultiBit and post an Address. I'll cover your loss this time.

I'll vouch for electrum.  It works without the blockchain.  That is all. ;D

wow, thanks a lot! 16UywcYyhHWRtQtijS2qmi13BCdSFUQVrb. it's still pretty crazy that lost btc are pretty much lost forever.

fe74ac03c5385ec6a64115d75654820bce47db0132d7faf9d7806cce70d21693 (http://blockchain.info/tx-index/fe74ac03c5385ec6a64115d75654820bce47db0132d7faf9d7806cce70d21693)

That should more than make you whole. You can keep the Qt client running and see if it ever syncs up and recovers those coins. It's kind of crazy that lost coins are pretty much lost forever, but it is vastly preferable to the alternative where it would be not much harder than trivial to rip them off of an address.

That was very generous of Atruk, but if you check my post it should describe how to retrieve your BTC, although if you do recover it you should probably send it back to Atruk =p.

I don't mind spreading the wealth as long as people are civil about things. I just hate to see people discouraged because there aren't very many (or any) good writeups that go over each client's pros and cons.

the real barrier to entry is going to be for the late-comers who are buying coins at hundreds of times the price of the early-birds.

that's also true, but in order for a btc to be worth anything, the rich have to be willing to spend it and redistribute it to others. The early miners might have an unfair advantage, but overall in the end, new comers don't really end up losing anything. they just have less of a headstart.

I believe many of the early miners have thrown a lot of their positions into circulation already.