Trouble with bootstrap.dat file

[CrazyChrisCA]

This is for PatrickMacH (or anyone else who can help):

Hello, Patrick!

I tried to send this to you as a PM but the system tells me that you have blocked PM's from newbies.  So, I'm posting it here.

I made a donation and downloaded the bootstrap.dat.az file from this forum thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1310261.msg55536769#msg55536769

I unzipped the file using 7zip and put the resulting bootstrap.dat file in my ~/.bitcoin directory.  However, when I run bitcoin-qt it appears it ignore the bootstrap.dat file and is syncing with the network from the beginning, saying it's going to take 2 days to process.

Any suggestions on how I can fix this?

Thanks!

Regards,

Chris

[ranochigo]

As of Bitcoin Core 0.20.0, the client does not automatically import bootstrap files. In fact, as of 0.10.0 it can actually be slower than synchronizing directly most of the time; downloading the blocks in parallel and verifying at the same time will reduce your synchronization time exponentially. Downloading bootstrap.dat still means your client will spend some time to verify the blocks.

If you want to continue, you have to specify -loadblocks=bootstrap.dat as an argument at startup.

[CrazyChrisCA]

Thank you for that help!  It's -loadblock not -loadblocks but your help got me pointed in the right direction.

Thanks, again!

Chris

[tuga]

As of Bitcoin Core version v22.0.0 (2023), I manged to import the bootstrap.dat by creating a bitcoin.conf file on the bitcoin data dir, in my case, G:/Bitcoin_data, with the following code:

Code:

loadblock=G:/Bitcoin_data/bootstrap.dat

Bitcoin core started importing the bootstrap.dat on the next time I opened it.