Bitcoin Forum

I'm three years behind on Bitcoin Core. Does anyone know if there is a quicker way to download the blockchain other than using the Bitcoin Core software? It's running far too slow.
Thanks.

There's nothing quicker than receiving information from nodes (just like torrents). Why is it slow to you? How many connections do you have? I personally wouldn't trust a guy that will give me the blk files, but I guess he can't do anything rather than waste your time.

You can always download the blockchain bootstrap file from a torrent and manually put it under data directory Bitcoin-Qt at:

Windows: %APPDATA%\Bitcoin
Linux: ~/.bitcoin
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/

http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/bootstrap.dat.torrent

This way you only have to update the last week's blocks and not the full blockchain, as reference let me share this article who explains how to install bitcoin faster:

http://www.bitcoin-en.com/install-bitcoin-qt-faster.html

There was another way to speed up the download of blockchains is to upgrade to SSD and increase ram.
It would help to speed up the syncing process but if you don't have SSD but you have a large ram memory in your system you can optimize the syncing by editing the Bitcoin.conf file and add "-dbcache=".

The value always depends on your ram memory so if you have 8GB memory you should set it to -dbcache=4096 times two if you have 16GB of memory.
You can get a huge improvement if you have SSD so without increasing the ram the syncing process is much faster than HDD.


I think downloading the blocks directly will still need to rescan and reindex that may also take a long time before you can able to use the wallet properly.

that file last update was on 2015 and only contains the first 317000 blocks, it's size is 22566124235 byte (~21gb).
Now, the blockchain size is around 300gb. Meaning, even if he downloads the torrent file, his bitcoin core wallet will have to download more than 280gb of data to fully synchronize.
Besides, since version 0.10, using core to download from other peers became faster than downloading from torrent (read the update on top of the article you linked).

As BitMaxz suggested, using SSD and increasing the dbcache might speed up the process.

If I can remember correctly, LoyceV had compiled a file including datas of this year even. You can download the file and use that as LoyceV is more than enough trusted (unlikely to use malicious code inside).
@LoyceV, I can't find the link, hence, the mention.

Here you go:

• Bitcoin block data available in CSV format (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5246271.0)
• List of all Bitcoin addresses with a balance (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5254914.0)

You can download huge files from blockchair.com

• https://gz.blockchair.com/bitcoin/
• https://blockchair.com/api/docs

That is not useful for "synchronizing your full node". For that you'll need to download the raw block data, and verify them one block at a time. There is no way to speed it up any more than this by changing the download step method.

If you put the chainstate-directory on SSD, it already gives a significant performance increase while you can keep the large blockdata on HDD.
More RAM helps a lot too.

I shared a pruned blockchain, but stopped updating it. The last update was 14 months ago. See Bitcoin Core pruned blockchain: download it here! (DON'T DO THIS!) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5177528.0).

Thanks, but:

In short: having Bitcoin Core download it's own blocks is by far the recommended method. On a fast computer with fast internet it can be done well within a day.

My bad, I thought it will be working for full node as I couldn’t remember it was only working for pruned node. If that's the case, it will be a pain to run full node unless people have good internet connection.