Bitcoin Forum

Anyone have the full database of bitcoin core upload on cloud servers, such as google drive, drop box, mega and open load?
I’d like to have the full database of bitcoin core as quick as possible, but if let the core syncs by itself. Perhaps will take days, even 1-2 weeks. I know there is a website offer the torrent, but the download speed is not that quick, 300 kb/s to 1+ mb/s.
Thanks! :)

I have never downloaded a full-node wallet(bitcoin core) before but I heard about the speed of downloading the latest version of bitcoin core (will update this with when find it).

Personally, I do not like this approach but you can refer to this posts to find google drive files:

• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1310261.msg19289328#msg19289328
• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2321650.0

I haven't seen what you're looking for out in the wild.

The download speed depends on your hardware speed. From what I've read, I think syncing on Linux is much faster than on Windows, probably because of better (cache) memory management. My 3 year old i3 can download the full blockchain in a day, if I prune to a RAM drive, with default dbcache settings

For a fast download you'll need:
-enough RAM for file caching
-an SSD
-a fast CPU to verify blocks
-(obviously also fast internet)

If you run an hdd on Windows low on RAM it will indeed take a long time to sync.

I'd feel uncomfortable downloading anything other than the official peer verified blockchain. It make take quite a while to download it, but, if you run it as a background task, it isn't too intrusive. Once you have got a verified copy, it pays to keep a couple of backups so that you never have to download it again.

Pre-validated blockchains aren't particularly safe since it opens you up to attacks if an attacker tricks you to be on a fork of theirs.

You can copy the blocks to your data directory but I wouldn't recommend copying the block index nor the chainstate if you are paranoid. If you have a fast computer, rebuilding it wouldn't take a long time.

If you have an okay internet speed and enough ram, consider increasing your dbcache and you should experience a considerable improvement.

It's likely going to be faster to just do it via Bitcoin core than downloading a torrent which may or may not be compromised and reindex it.

A torrent used to be offered over at  bitcoin.org [OUTDATED]  (https://bitcoin.org/bin/block-chain/) but, with the latest editions of the Bitcoin Core client there's no real benefit from doing it and thus isn't updated anymore. Depending on whether you want to host a full node yourself or not a lightweight client might be more beneficial.

There is no security risk in downloading the whole blockchain (assuming the blockchain file itself is not infected with malware).
It would be a problem if someone would download the chainstate. But the blockchain itself is fine.
Since core does verify the whole blockchain itself it would attract attention if some blocks were incorrect.

Therefore this does not open up a new an additional attack vector.

Thanks for helping! :D I see a lot of advice and opinions. :) :) :)

You ether need more peers (to activate more than defal which is 8 I do believe) and/or get faster storage using RAID with HDD or use SSD.

Connection to more peers won't help in syncing the blockchain.
The speed is mostly limited through CPU and Hard Drive, not amount of connections or internet speed.

A RAID is for redundat storage (done for reliability). It does NOT increase the speed in any way.

Only SSD do give a distinct advantage in speed.

Hmmm.... I thought raid is used to put lets say 5HDDs and thus you boost the speed as every HDD contains different information, so the data is distributed across multiple HDDs. Enabling multiple HDDs to work as one faster, I am sorry maybe I haven't understood raid well enough then, thanks for pointing this out, will look it up when I get home.

As it goes for connections, well thought more connections = faster, since peers can have the up speed limit.

No. This isn't really how raid works. You're referring to what I'd say is an example of RAiD 3 (or a varient of it). Where 3 hard drives are used as sort of one hard drive. The idea behind that is that if one hard drive fails, you still have another two so you have only lost a third of your data. In this example it's a bit stupid to incorporate and I believe it would slow bitcoin core down.

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You DON'T need a Solid State Drive to download the data. A fairly new laptop will download everything in about 10-20 hours (even a slower one). SSDs make it faster, but if you don't have enough ram anyway (8GB or more) then I'd say it's pointless. Also, if you do have enough RAM, then there's less access to the hard drive that is needed that isn't loaded into it (other than data that needs to be tested from the drive)...

You can use RAID 0 where the data is divided between 2 drives, effectively almost doubling the speed if you have 2 drives, and even faster if you add more. There's zero redundancy though; if one drive fails, all of your files are toast. It depends on what type of RAID you do.

Learn more about it if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think that "syncing the blockchain" is just about downloading 170+ gigs worth of data...

The actual downloading of the data is only half the task. During the sync process, Bitcoin Core is also validating each and every block and also indexing transactions. This is the process that becomes heavily hardware dependent... there is a LOT of reading/writing of data to/from your harddrive and a lot of CPU computation doing all the validation of hashes etc.

Having ultrafast broadband internet and being able to download 170+Gigs in a matter of minutes isn't really going to help your total sync time much if your CPU/RAM/storage combo isn't up to the task :-\

Honestly, just install Bitcoin Core and let it do it's thing...

Sort of.

Connecting to a single fast peer is the best way. 

Modern computer & SSD -- from blocks ~100,000 to ~250,000, can sync fast enough to do something like 20-50MB/s.

re: RAID, this is untrue, but I won't go into length about it, can do a simple google search.  I always set my RAID up as striped.

You are right, whenever i hear/read about RAID i am automatically thinking about RAID 3/5/7.
The fact that RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) 0 does not store data redundantly seems a bit odd to me.  ;D