Can someone tell me what is the best practice for initializing a new bitcoind node quickly? Do I really need to wait 2 days for the blockchain to be downloaded and validated before the node is operational? As far as I can tell most of the time is spent not on network resources but on CPU resources, at least for the hardware I am running (Azure & Amazon EC).
If I already have another fully initalized node that I trust, is there anyway I can just copy the blockchain database from a trusted node over to the new node (bypassing all the time consuming validation)?
If you have access (can login and copy stuff to and from) to a fully synced node, you could copy over most of the stuff in the data directory and the node would just pick from where that data was left off.