Question on prune and order of provisioning the download

[cloverme]

When enabling the prune option to 8GB, will bitcoind download the entire blockchain and then prune it back to 8GB or only download the last 8GB of the blockchain?

[-ck]

The whole lot. Unless you import the blockchain from another pruned node that has done the whole lot once, then it has to download the whole lot to confirm its validity before pruning it as it goes. I've imported a pruned block chain that I pruned once to half a dozen new pruned nodes,  but the first time it came from a full block chain of my own (that way I need not trust anyone else's data.)

[cloverme]

Thanks, much appreciated.  I just built a new node but started it with prune due to some limited space available at the moment.