What does "synchronizing" mean and why does it take so long?
Actually here in China, on a 50mb/sec fiber line I can run a full bitcoin node and have it up and running in a week, not bad, it used to be a few days, but now 200gb it takes a long time to get all the blocks loaded, and all the transactions filled in, just takes time
Want to see worse play with 'ethereum' it can take a month for more to sync a full-node the reason is that the the transaction have executable code, and so when your 'syncing' your also having to execute all the code associated with each transaction,
ON BTC the code is minimal, in fact most has been disabled
But on ETH say right now they're at 5,000,000 block, you might load with a '--fast', but you'll only get to 4,800,000, then it will take a month or more to catch up with current, if your not running a super computer, you may never catch up to current.
BTC has about 2,000-4,000 transaction per block that must be loaded ( if you load with -txindex )
I'm sure all here are just using wallets and not running full nodes, so who cares right?
Of course just today for instance I copied bitcoin path to a portable disk, and then copied to another computer and the new bitcoind was 'synced' in 10-15 minutes, thus IF YOU can don't download a full-node, just get a copy from somebody and save yourself a lot of time
It's takes on average 10 minutes to deal with 50,000 transactions, every 10 minutes they choose 2,000-4,000 that go on next block, currently BTC is about 504,000 blocks, so its about 200 million transactions to date
When you talk about 'sync' it really depends how long since you last ran your software 'bitcoind', say you turned it off for a month, it might take a few days to catch up with the current-block ( called best block ), if your not in 'sync',, e.g. if your not running the same block as everybody else right now, then you can't really do anything, because by definition you ain't in sync,
Thus once you have bitcoind ( full node ) running, you must leave it running for ever, unless you want to big pain in the ass when you turn it back on
Essentially why it takes a long time to 'confirm' is that every 10 minutes when a new block is created there is a pool of 50,000 waitings transactions, some are shit, some are real, but only 2k-4k get out of the gate, the software chooses which has paid the highest fee ( that fee is a lotto ticket that goes to the miner, the guy who hashes that block, not only he get 12 btcs, but he also gets $1,000's of USD in fees
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