Bitcoin Forum

So I downloaded the Ethereum-Wallet(MIST) because I want to get into altcoins as well as Bitcoin.

When I started the Wallet, it started downloading the Ethereum Blockchain. This is more then
24h ago at it seems the closer I get to finish downloading the whole thing the slower the download
gets.

I mean it's getting ridiciulous with this massive blockchain downloads and the wiaitng time,
especially because I download around 15GB so far. 15GB I could download in less than an hour
so why does this take so long with these blockchains I thought its like a p2p download,

Shouldn't it be pretty fast?


And o another note the number of total Blocks seem to be changing while downloading. I wouldn't
have been surprised if it would grow bigger because of more transactions in the blockchain etc.

but it is jumping frim 1,480,000ish to 1,580,000ish Blocks... back and forth...

I'm relatively new to the cryptocoin-world so forgive me if some of these questions seem ignorant or naive.

Thanks!
BTC Gambler

A few hours for me. But I did that a few months ago now.

It takes very very long time. very bad* must wait hours*: is not future.

i am in the hopes some thing comes back from the future for betterment of online cryptographic currency!   ✧٩(•́⌄•́๑)

Not sure why that is, mine only took a few hours with a 3570k, SSD and 80 Mbps down.

My fully synced wallet (in Roaming\Ethereum) is barely over 12 GB so I guess your wallet is not fast syncing like mine does for some reason.

Edit: This might be helpful but I haven't tried it so backup your wallet if it's not empty: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/603/help-with-very-slow-mist-sync

at the moment i synch my wallet every day.  because the download is really slow. otherwise i could miss a sell option because i am out of synch. i use Ethereum-Wallet 0.7.3 on OSX.

btw: anybody knows where the blockchain is stored on OS X? thank you.

I'm not gonna restart it now after it ran for 28h an is at arround 90%...
I just hope the last 10% wont take me another 28h.

thanks for your input guys. I appreciate it

Finally, after 36h...............

That's tough. What kind of CPU/internet connection do you have?

Use linux and latest wallet version.  Takes about 2 hours

no it doesnt... all this happened on a linux mint, on a SSD drive, latest wallet version and 50Mb/s internet.......

It takes a long time. Downloading just about any Blockchain feels like the Internet in 1999 on a 56 Kbps modem to me.

that was a typo with the 50Mb/s in the post above.

It is an AMD 6 core, don't know the exact model atm, look it up later at home.... and internet is 20MB/s....

Downloading it last 4 days and im roughly in the middle. 100% HDD usage. 5400 RPM HDD and internet capable 3MB/s download ...
I think this is VERY VERY BAD.

what about renting
a) some computing server from Amazon
b) 100GB SSD VPS with 1gbit internet. But im unsure if Linux blocks would be compatible with Windows.

I actually did this just the other day as I was comparing sync times between the various cryptos and eMunie.

Eth needs a fast hard drive more than anything else, then RAM, then CPU....also you should use Parity, the differences between the various client flavors is extreme to say the least.  Geth is 4-5x slower than Parity.

If you are using Parity, have a semi-decent SSD, 4GB+ of free memory available and a run of the mill 4 core Intel, expect about 2 hours per million blocks.  If you are using a platter drive, double it.

Sometimes it is hard to imagine how some of these platforms will become "mainstream" as they advertise. Do the development teams of each really believe their platforms will become really useful for the real world? How will they overcome the technical difficulties? To use Ethereum as an example it is only around 1 or 2 years and yet the blockchain is already over 15gb. There isn't even 1 million users in the system yet doing 100's of thousands of transactions per minute yet.

Sometimes it feels like the are just playing around and being naive about what they believe.

atleast ETH actually has transactions

XMR and many others just sit there ;0

Same boat here, I'm back to the original 4gb of ram on my mac till I can rma my other sticks.  I let it run overnight and I came back to 40 GB of swap according to the activity monitor... I've now launched with the command line and am trying to limit the cache size... not quite sure if it is working though, swap is slowly growing... I was also under the impression that the --fast option was effectively a p2p download and reduced the verification.  This part of the setup is definitely not good, I may try to restore an old setup from a backup before my reinstall to see if I can get the sync to not be as memory intensive.  For ethereum they will need to develop some sort of distributed pruning if they want to have the blockchain companies (companies pay for the storage that they use, otherwise they are pruned) because these companies will lead to extra bloat... that and ram prices aren't dropping as fast as storage prices so there needs to be some changes in that department.

so, I navigated to where geth (CLI interface) and manually ran it with this:
and it finished syncing after a few hours, this was with a fast (100+ Mbps network and an ssd), but non of the run away memory issues I was facing with the main client when trying to do the initial sync.  You could use a larger cache and see if it speeds it up more (value is in MB).

Lol, 15GB would be a problem in 2000s, not 2016. 1TB hdd costs 50 euro. Do you really believe people that are going to use blockchain technology stick with computers worth 100$ each ? 4k bluray movies have 40GB + .
In the meantime, one of the many latest news https://consensys.net/static/BlockApps-Minsheng-Consensys.pdf . So i wonder, what are these giant companies that are actively working on ethereum do about it's size, that's definitely a problem, NOT.
Just read the ethereum latest news, at this rate price growth will be sustained by usage in 1 to 2 years, there's just too many news.

So I can confirm that if you are having syncing issues with the gui client, directly running geth seems to solve that (and be faster).

been trying to download the blockchain now for like 2 days (ok .. im on a bit of a slow internet connection) but it did finish all the 2,4xx,xxx and then it started giving me this:


is it starting from the beginning again?! and this is going at much slower rate than it did before?!


btw .... thats ETC not ETH

ETH is a ridicolous blockchain to download
Tonight I made an attempt, the estimation of download time required was 47 years  ;D I give up and closed that clowny wallet just because my estimation is that my laptop should die before me haha

I am quite confused here so you are saying that this was wrong estimation or correct one?
How Ethereum's blockchain despite being smaller in size (it is only 16 GB AFAIK) than bitcoin's blockchain is so hard to download?

probably the correct one :) indeed often it happens you download 30k of blockchain but the target refresh itself of 100k
better to use myetherwallet instead a typical physical software wallet

How do you know blockchain is downloaded and synced?
Running Geth 1.6.4 with flags --fast --cache=1024 (Windows 10).
Screenshot: https://ibb.co/gMVQyF

maybe you should check your processor and internet connection

why?

Just as a datum, I started for the first time the Ethereum app on Thursday the 8th of June and I am still downloading the blockchain today on the 13th of June (and nothing is wrong with my internet connection). According to calculations I am at about 90% from completion and actually downloading at a rate of 0.17% blockchain per hour. Calculated prediction for 100% completion is putting me to the 17th of June, and that is if it stays at 0.17% blockchain/hour. Since start, it went from 5% per hour down to now 0.17%. This is ridiculously slow and completely nonsense. Just imagine what its gonna be when the blockchain attain 10 millions blocks. This is a total joke! And, this is my third attempt at completing the whole blockchain. The two previous ones were stopped because I thought my computer and or Ethereum installation was something wrong. I now am confident that everything is operating normally (according to posted information and research) and that I must be submitted to this ridiculously slow installation. After the whole 8 or 9 days (I hope) of installation I will be a happy owner of a tedious Ethereum blockchain. 

Just be patient guys!

for a decent connection or a decent streaming video connection,

in 5 more years you will need 5tb hard drive and a few months to download eth blockchain.
in 50 years you will need 1petabyte and 1 year to download eth blockchain.

or just using an unsafe, choked, clogged third party lite client which can disappearing with all your eth.

Just wait Metropolis update protocol and grab your light client afterall

hi guys,

I've been syncing for ~7 hours.

Here's a screenshot:

https://image.ibb.co/hT6wNv/Screen_Shot_2017_07_09_at_12_49_51_PM.png

Two questions:

1. Is it normal to only have 2-3 peers connected?
2. why is the chain structure percentage progress counted backwards?

Taking several days to get the entire blockchain is normal. Just be patient.

You need to download Geth (or locate it in your Mist installation).  

Navigate to the folder with Geth in the command line line.

geth removedb (to remove partial blockchain).
geth --fast --cache=1024 (basically trims most of the data you don't need - should take 3 - 6 hours to sync).

it's better to use a online wallet!
download the Ethereum Blockchain should be 2 days
lol

Ethereum will die before you finish

I haven't tried downloading one for myself before, but from what I have seen and read previously, I think that it is only normal for this to happen. It is normal for it to be quite slow and what's not. just be patient. Go get some sleep, or do something else, and I bet the download would be completed by the time you are back.