Blockchain takes seconds to download?

[James222]

Hi there. I recently downloaded and installed MultiBit. The problem is that when I select the option to re-synchronize to network, it only takes seconds. The couple videos I've watched about installing it said that it would take a good 40 minutes to download but me it only takes a couple seconds. My internet speed is 1.7 mb/s. Did I miss something when installing?

[Colin Miner]

Multibit doesn't need the full blockchain, so its quick to download a small part.

At present the blockchain is about 12Gb and growing every 10 minutes.

I'm not downloading that !

You don't have to. As a normal user of Bitcoin you are only interested in the parts of the blockchain that contain your transactions. That small portion is about 25Mb.

[Sonny]

If you are using a thin wallet (Electrum or Multibit), you only need to download the block headers (~22MB) instead of all the block data (~16GB).