Bitcoin Forum

I am using the official Bitcoin-QT client.  I placed my computer in the DMZ to eliminate the need for port forwarding.  I've been downloading the chain for several days and at this rate it will take a month!

Any special bitcoin.conf tweaks?  I am running Windows and do not have a bitcoin.conf by default.

Weird. What is your internet connection? I have 50mb down and it took around 5 hours for mine.

Perhaps a better question is what kind of hardware is on your client computer?

Just a newer i5 laptop w\ integrated graphics.  I am no where near maxing the CPU on this per task mgr.  Internet connection is 25 mbps.

It shouldn't take that long.

I think it's your internet/download speed.

You also have to consider the upload speed of the node you are downloading the blockchain from.  Upload speeds are typically much less than download speeds (my connection is 15 Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up).  Even worse, when I check the network traffic for my Bitcoin-qt client, there always seem to be 2 or 3 nodes fetching the blockchain at the same time from me, so my 1Mbit/s bandwidth gets divided among them.

Ron

big difficulty makes the blockchain slower if miners cant solve a block

Why not use their website to handle transactions?

What do you mean by "their website"?

It seems to me that you are confused with the website "blockchain.info" and the "bitcoin blockchain".

Usually, the bottleneck for a fresh download of the blockchain isn't the bandwidth, it's the seek rate of the harddrive.  Since each block must be checked in every way before the client will download the next block, and your CPU isn't hammered, it's probably due to the massive number of disk accesses that both checking the blocks as well as building the index require.  If you were to start with a fairly recent copy of the blockchain, from a torrent for example, and tell the client to "rescan" that blockchain, your delays would likely be almost as bad.