Running a node on a low-bandwith link

[CryptoBeing]

I know this might have been already addressed on this forum, but I have not found any specific post.
I'm based in Italy and have a really slow network connection 640 Kb/s download and 256 Kb/s upload.

Any chance to run a node on that link ?

Anybody has already attempted that ?

[OnkelPaul]

It's probably possible but could maybe saturate the link.
Why would you want to do it anyway? For mining, pools are preferrable. Some wallets such as bitcoin-qt require the blockchain to be present, but other such as Multibit don't, so you could use a local wallet without being a full node. I think that would be the best option for a low-bandwidth situation.

Onkel Paul

[CryptoBeing]

Why would you want to do it anyway?

For testing purposes only, to see how things work and possibly understand something more about bitcoins.
I would not have an appropriate HW to mine anyway.
Thanks for your reply.

[OnkelPaul]

If you really want to do that, you should download the whole blockchain on a computer with a faster network connection and put it onto a memory stick, then use that to give your node a head start.
Downloading the complete blockchain (a bit more than 12 GB) over your 640Kb/s link would take a little less than 2 days if you used the whole bandwidth all the time. In practice, if you let your node fetch blocks from peers it will take quite a bit longer.
Ask yourself whether doing this just out of curiousity is worth the effort and time.

Onkel Paul