On the 13th Feb 2021, I ran the installer for the clients Litecoin and Bitcoin core
Litecoin was complete in a few days and I now have an active wallet
Litecoin is a copy of bitcoin with small changes, the time it takes to sync either LTC or BTC full nodes should be roughly the same. The only reason it takes different times is because LTC's total blockchain size is 41.19 GB while BTC's is 383.87 GB which is 9 times bigger so it has to take 9 times longer too.
The files are being stored on a dedicated SATA drive.
The bottlenecks are:
- HDD versus SSD
- Slow CPU
- Low RAM
- Slow internet speed
- Is it normal to take 1-2 months?
If the bottlenecks above exist then yes.
- If a platform requires months to install, doesn't that seem a somewhat flawed concept?
The "full node" takes longer to
initially download 12 years worth of history, it is bound to take a long time. Although it is not taking months but only days for regular computers and hours for top tier ones.
- Will Bitcoin Core become unusable in the coming years, when the blockchain size has grown even more?
No because hardware is also improving, in fact improving faster than bitcoin blockchain grows.
- Are there any plans in the Bitcoin development cycle to address this problem?
The record for initial sync is 6 hours, so it is addressed. There is also a lot of optimization in bitcoin core aiming to speed things up even more.
There is also alternative options for those who can't use full nodes, they are called SPV clients. They don't take as much space and don't need that much verification because all they do is download block headers (80 byte each, with total of about 50 MB) and verify that. Then all they have to do is get transaction history, build merkle roots, bloom filters, etc. which are all fast and cheap.
An example SPV client is Electrum
https://electrum.org/