Bitcoin Forum

So I've decided that keeping a lot of bitcoins in an online wallet is not a good idea, so I'm downloading Bitcoin qt to transfer the majority of my balances to an offline wallet.  It's been syncing for about an hour, and has done about 150k blocks.  But the status bar barely has a sliver green!  Is this an additive process?  Does each block take more time to do than the first?  I know it's doing calculations, but for block 3, does it have to do calcs for 3, 2, and 1?  I giess I'm not sure what to expect with the syncing time.  I had figured that if I got halfway in about 45 minutes I'd be done in an hour and a half?

the current blockchain should be around 11gb, so it depends on the download speed.

but why do you even download the blockchain when you're going to use an offline wallet?

The syncing is getting slower cause block 1 has no transactions, and as the blockchain gets bigger, it has more transactions to validate. Also this is hindered by I/O speeds as well as network speeds.

Leave it on overnight - that did the trick for me.

Download a bootstrap.dat to get most of the blockchain.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0
https://archive.org/details/bitcoin_bootstrap.dat

Al right, everything synced ok, but my computer crashed when I was doing something totally unrelated today.  Now when I boot up bitcoin qt, it takes forever to load and looks like it's stuck on the splash screen "verifying blocks" (It was down less than 5 minutes).

Is this normal to have to wait this long to boot up bitcoin qt?

yes. it's really resource hungry. multibit is much faster

So let's take this one step further.  I've submitted a transaction and after 2 hours it's only showing on 12 nodes.  Is there a reason it's this low?  I would assume that because it say i'm only connected to 8 peers, this is slowing it down.  But is there a way to connect to one of the bigger nodes to get it to take up on the network faster?

1)It is normal that downloading the whole blockchain is slow
2)It is normal that starting bitcoin-qt takes time, it verify the latest blocks

You should not use bitcoin-qt, you said you just want an offline wallet, you should use something like Multibit.
Bitcoin-QT is a full node client, it is for people who want to have the whole blockchain and help relay blocks, wich of course means keeping the client on as much time as possible. It is not meant to be used just as an offline wallet, start it and quickly send transactions. For that, get multibit. You can happily have both, multibit and bitcoin-qt anyway.

Duly noted!  Is there a way to get this last transaction broadcasted before I open up multibit and get things going there?

smart im deff looking into this cuz this is my biggest fear wallet robbery

Yeah, I had an incident yesterday that freaked me out so I figured I should get an offline wallet...

Unfortunately, before I turn Bitcoin qt off, I still need to figure out how to get this last damn transaction to confirm.  It has an appropriate miner's fee and everything!  But just isn't broadcasting to more than about 12 nodes...