Bitcoin & download speeds

[miztaziggy]

I live out in the middle of the country, so I have a really slow broadband connection, it is about 1.6 Mb which equals about 140 kb/s at the best of times.

I recently updated my PC with new version of Windows and downloaded the client again. Believe it or not, I have now had the client running for about 12 hours, and it still says over 41,000 blocks remaining and last block received was 273 days ago.

While it is running, it really slows down my internet speed, games lag and pages load slowly.

Why is this so slow?

How does Bitcoin ever expect to be useful in the mainstream if every time people with slow internet open their wallet, it takes hours and hours to update.

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[Gabi]

Why is this so slow?

Because it is downloading 7GB of transactions, also relaying transactions and blocks to other peers

How does Bitcoin ever expect to be useful in the mainstream if every time people with slow internet open their wallet, it takes hours and hours to update.

Because lightweight wallets and online wallets exists

[miztaziggy]

Ok, so now run that through another 3 or 4 years

Imagine bitcoin increases in popularity, number of transactions increases exponentially.

How big will the data file then be? Download 25Gb? 50Gb? Your monthly allowance on your broadband connection gone on just using the client?

And lightweight wallets - ok, so what happens when everyone switches to that?

[Gabi]

Read the satoshi white paper  blockchain pruning will solve that problem

[Brushan]

Or maybe the miners and the lightweight wallet developers will have the blockchains in the future. I don't think this will be a problem. Just like with fiat currencys; most ordinary folks don't have databases of all the transactions being made. We leave that to people in that business.

[pinger]

I get my computer running for 3 days because an electrical shutdown of my computer and my wallet was corrupted so start to download it again, the problem, my antivirus is getting crazy with all the data downloaded, maybe you can check your AV too. After turn down the AV it just take a few minutes to download the whole blocks.

[Stephen Gornick]

How does Bitcoin ever expect to be useful in the mainstream if every time people with slow internet open their wallet, it takes hours and hours to update.

If you are using v0.8, the initial download is about a day or less -- and much less if you have decent hardware and bandwidth.

If you are using v0.7, stop (or stop, if you don't have decent hardware, bandwidth and patience.)

If you are using really old hardware, consider MultiBit, which is an SPV client -- it only downloads block headers and unspent transactions for addresses in the wallet.

[justusranvier]

If you are using v0.8, the initial download is about a day or less -- and much less if you have decent hardware and bandwidth.

Under ideal conditions I can download the blockchain in about an hour, where ideal conditions are gigabit ethernet connection to the other node and fast cpu/storage hardware on both ends.