Issues with the official BitCoin client under Windows 7

[Kerapt]

BitCoin is a really cool concept, and I'll probably follow it for a good long while. Anyways, thought I'd drop by with some feedback on some issues I've experienced so far.

Issue 1: The wiki states somewhere, which I very appriopriately can't seem to find now, that the BitCoin client will work in the background and not slow down my computer.

When starting the BitCoin client after a reboot, it will take about three minutes to start the client itself, during which it (bitcoin.exe) takes up from 2%-10% of CPU power and will not show up in the systray or respond to attempts to quit the process using the task manager. It also slows down my computer significantly. This is on a 1.84 GHz Core Duo laptop with 1 GB RAM. Things are otherwise (as in without the BitCoin client running) very speedy.

Issue 2: I'm not entirely sure I've got the right picture on this one. There was a video on YouTube discussing BitCoin in general. There was a question about whether the data (blocks?) downloaded to each node about all transactions would take large amount of space. The answer was that only a few MB's would be needed, supposedy even when the number of transactions had grown to large amounts.

The BitCoin client installer is rougly 5 MB in size. The data folder for BitCoin is now about 200 MB (blk0001.dat is about 120 MB and blkindex.dat about 80 MB). Aren't blocks a certain number of transactions processed and "approved" within the system? And as the numbers of transactions rise, will this grow to huge amounts of data needed to be downloaded? It took about three hours for the BitCoin client to have downloaded all the then current blocks the first time I started it. During that whole time data was furiously being written to the HDD. CPU usage was at about 10%. Internet connection speed should have something to do with I guess, but then again, I've got a speedy connection at about 1 MB/s. I think the number of connections at the time were 8-15.

These are things that I think has to be dealt with in order for regular peope (read not tech-savvy) to be able to cope using this system.

Also, but a bit off topic, I guess I have to read up on how BitCoin works a little bit more in detail because I wouldn't rely on it for serious use until I know how it works. The weusecoins.com site tells me far too little - it seems I've got to go to the design document written by Satoshi Nakamoto to get a better overview of how it actually works.

Thanks for a good time so far!

[1713613460]

1713613460

[1713613460]

1713613460

[1713613460]

1713613460

[1713613460]

1713613460

[theymos]

Issue 2: I'm not entirely sure I've got the right picture on this one. There was a video on YouTube discussing BitCoin in general. There was a question about whether the data (blocks?) downloaded to each node about all transactions would take large amount of space. The answer was that only a few MB's would be needed, supposedy even when the number of transactions had grown to large amounts.

That's not implemented in the client yet, though the protocol supports it.

[rezin777]

These are things that I think has to be dealt with in order for regular peope (read not tech-savvy) to be able to cope using this system.

While I agree with this statement, it's not for the reasons you've described here.

You paid a lot of attention to cpu, hdd, and net usage while experimenting with bitcoin. The not tech-savvy people will do no such thing. Not tech-savvy people usually don't know which version of windows they are using, how much RAM they have, or the speed of their internet connection.

Anyway, it's nice to hear that you are enjoying bitcoin so far. Perhaps in the future you could create a guide that would help the spread of bitcoin to the not tech-savvy!


 

[silvercardbank]

i am not at all tech savy and i had the exact same problem. got tpo download see the conections being made now it has disappeared in the background somewhere and i have not been able to get it to run again.
can anyone walk me through it please ?

[malditonuke]

i am not at all tech savy and i had the exact same problem. got tpo download see the conections being made now it has disappeared in the background somewhere and i have not been able to get it to run again.
can anyone walk me through it please ?

if you are saying that you ran it on windows 7 and it disappeared (maybe after you closed it?), then it's probably in the tray in the bottom-right-hand corner.  If you left click the little triangle, a box will pop up with the bitcoin symbol in it.  double-click it to bring it back up.

sorry if this totally doesn't apply to you - just not sure of your level of expertise. 

[silvercardbank]

Thanks for the advise, yes that's all it was, and i have been learning fast.

[conspirosphere.tk]

Re: the space taken by the data I am starting to find it both annoying and alarming.
I created two 1GB encrypted folders with Truecrypt to store there portable versions of the client. And now that I connect the client after a few days they are chocked full with blk0001.dat at 500MB and blkindex.dat at 218 MB! WTF! And this thing is going to grow infinitely?!

So now I will have to create new encrypted virtual drives with how much space???

My humble suggestion/request to the developers is to find a way around this urgently. Having several GBs of data to move around and keep safe, not to mention to download, is not going to be practical, not to speak of user friendliness.