block kickstart

[harik]

With 130k+ blocks, it takes a long time to fetch them all via the network.   Is it possible to have a seed-file that you can scan-in and be reasonably up-to-date?   At that point it's just a matter of getting the newer blocks from your peers.

It would seem that the blk0001.dat could be "seeded" and rescanned to make the indexes, but everything goes pear-shaped when I try that.

Ideas?

[godofal]

just leave bitcoin open for a day or so, it wont slow down anything (noticably at least) and then its updated

[Yatta99]

It's being worked on as a future client implementation. If you see the discussions in the other areas of the boards talking about a 'lite client', this is what they are talking about.

[mikeintimesaves9]

I just installed on two comps this past week.  It took about 12 hours of connectivity to get fully updated.  Yatta certainly has a point that in the future if BTC becomes successful the status quo would be impractical.

[BitCoinBarter]

You can get a headstart on block downloading.

Goto http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/ , but read their warning:

WARNING:
Only use these data files IF YOU HAVE AN EMPTY (or no) WALLET.
While it "may" be fine to put these in with an existing wallet, and use the -rescan
option, the target audience here is new bitcoin installs with an empty wallet.

Who needs this?

- Any first-time user of bitcoin, who wishes to avoid the lengthy
  block chain download through the p2p network.

Instructions:

- Unzip and copy blk*.dat files into your bitcoin data directory
- Remove any database/log* files from your bitcoin data directory
- Run bitcoin or bitcoind

What this does:

- Resets the bitcoin block database and block database index
  to approximately block #120000 (give or take a few hundred).

- If you have a wallet with unprocessed transactions, the client
  may not recognize them.  Thus, the above warning: Only use these data files
  IF YOU DO NOT ALREADY HAVE A WALLET.

Source: README.txt, updated 2011-04-28