Bitcoin Forum

When I open the client and have 115 blocks remaining to catch up, The client tells me that I am 99.94% complete.  This implies that the next block should make me 100% complete.

Although what it is telling me is accurate for the entire block chain, this information is about as useful as Microsofts estimated time remaining bar telling me there are 20 seconds remaining for over 2 minutes.

Really  this number should be telling me how much time it will take to complete the remaining blocks   so if I open the client with 115 blocks to get complete, it should estimate that I am 1/115 complete or less than 1% to give me an estimate how much time it will take to catch up.

You just can't tell how much time it takes to finish the block download! Bitcoin-Qt displays real ABSOLUTE values and no guesses (remaining blocks and how far the progress is).
I'm sure we won't ever change this (again) if no display format is found that the whole world loves ...

Edit: Why does 99,94% from 100% imply the next block will give 100%, this is not what I read from it, sorry.

Dia

Because when something is 99.94% complete it shouldn't take another 1/2 hour from that point.   It's a useless stat to most people, but bitcoin is not ready for  most people yet...   

As I said an implementable idea, that ALL or at least most people like for that progressbar is neatly impossible to achieve IMHO.
Perhaps it's good, that Bitcoin is not YET ready for the masses!

Dia

GuinnessBIT, this has been bothering me a lot to, and I agree with your proposal completely. I don't know what the others are on about, this should be fixable. The client knows the block depth of the newest block it has, and it supposedly knows the depth of the newest block, or it can make quite an accurate guess at least. Those two numbers should be all that's needed to implement the much more meaningful progress bar.

We're not interested in time guesstimates, but in progress. Right now, progress is shown starting from the genesis block, but it would be much more useful to show it starting from the last downloaded block before syncing started.

Okay, I really thought you wish a time-left based approach ... I took another look and think about integrating a display option for switching between absolute and relative progressbar display. I'm not sure if I get an core developer ACK on this though.

Dia

I think the time to download of the block chain relates to other factors like internet speed, cpu speed, hard disk's performance besides the total number of blocks and the blocks left to finish. Since it's nearly impossible to accurately calculate those other factors, I think there can't be any "X time left" progress bar.

There can't be any very accurate timing, no, but it should be possible to track the average time per block and extrapolate. But that's beside the point, just an accurate % done relative to the last block at startup is what's desired.

normally i could download a 3GB torrent or ftp file in 90 min on my connection

but it takes at least a day to download the blockchain so its probably
not being uploaded fast enough

AFAIK the chain sync speed depends on many factors, one is the upload speed of the one peer you are downloading the chain from.

Dia

I created a patch, which adds a relative progress bar display. If you want, compile for yourself and try it out:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1639

http://i49.tinypic.com/2mzzggx.png

Dia