Still possible to bootstrap blockchain via Torrent?

[pbleak]

As in the old days, or are those days past? I need to get a full client going within the next 5 days, but am unsure it'll sync on current connection.

[Anti-Cen]

As in the old days, or are those days past? I need to get a full client going within the next 5 days, but am unsure it'll sync on current connection.

Tor is so slow so what I do is point the browser at a local proxy server and that uses code to decide if it will
go direct for things like images, css but then uses Tor for page data and anything that's pushing anything
out in the Url

200gb of data over Tor ? Months it will take

[shulio]

He is asking about Torrent not Tor.

I do some google search and found this two links about your situation.
This site https://getbitcoinblockchain.com/ has torrent files to download. The have monthly and daily files.

But at this reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/718e7s/downloading_blockchain_via_torrent/) people say there is no speed difference between bitcoin daemon download and torrent download.

[ranochigo]

Chances are, if you were to download the bootstrap using an external source, the process would take longer than if you synchronized it using the client. The client can synchronize and download the Blockchain from your peers simultaneously. This would be way faster as opposed to if you were to get the outdated bootstrap and have the client verify it at the end.

If you want any significant speedup, you would have to find someone with a pre-validated data directory so that your client won't have to validate it all over again. I wouldn't consider this as secure as the other methods though.

[Anti-Cen]

He is asking about Torrent not Tor.

Sorry and thanks for the correction

Bit-torrent should take just a few days to get data if its anything like the one I use

[Xavieroz]

These days I have found myself again with the tedious task of having to download the [Suspicious link removed]pletely again. Due to the recent security issue related to the upnp library, I deactivated it and the blockchain seemed to simply be stuck. Once activated it was noticeable that it was going faster, but not too much.

From there, I considered if it would be feasible to share it by BitTorrent. I searched and saw that until version 0.10 of Bitcoin Core the client downloaded a large part of the chain by BitTorrent (the famous bootstrap.dat). But this is no longer the case in later versions.

[nc50lc]

The download speed might be faster if there are a lot of users "seeding", but keep in mind that using Torrent pose a huge security risk to your system.

Example: One person might intentionally integrated a malware disguised as a file in his seeds.
There are some counter measures you can do with the Torrent Client's settings (ex. BitTorrent) but regular users will find it hard to do so.

[Colorblind]

Downloading blockchain from outside sources kinda defeats it's purpose. Node designed in such way that it's downloading blocks from other nodes and validating their integrity while doing so.

[ScripterRon]

I have created multiple new nodes in the past 6 months.  Each time, the network was not the bottleneck.  It was CPU and disk (LevelDB in particular).  So even if you download the bootstrap with multiple parallel streams, your node will still need to validate each block and you will have the CPU and disk constraints.