Bitcoin Forum

I was helping my friend set up bitcoin today and it took for ever to get her blockchain downloaded.  Had 8 connections.  The internet speed is fast, torrents are downloaded super fast.  No the torrent application wasn't running at the time.  It will be done soon (I'm not there anymore). Just thought I'd ask and see what could the problem could have been.

It's a large blockchain.  I think taking forever is normal.  I have a very fast connection and a very fast computer and still it took a good part of a day.

Cool thanks.  I could have sworn when I redownloaded the blockchain a few days ago it only took a couple hours.  :-\

It mostly depends on a fast computer when it's verifying the block chain.  The speed of your net connection doesn't matter unless it's really really slow.

http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/

use it next time. :)

You can get more connections by enabling UPnP port forwarding on the router.

Or you could have downloaded a zip of the blockchain and averted this whole mess.

Thanks I never even thought about downloading the blockchain seperately.  I guess it was just a crappy netbook that was the problem.

1GB !! each of those tars is from genesis to upload date, eh? Can anyone confirm that they are compatible with client 0.4?

yes, it's every block to date in the filename. I can't confirm but I'm 100% certain it will work fine with 0.4.