Sync time seems excessive

[ca1e]

Hello,
Wondering if anyone can help me

I want to install Bitcoin Core

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

Bitcoin seems to be taking far longer..
Today is 27th February 2021..
Current ETA for network sync is another 3 weeks (49% complete, ~0.07% per hour).

I've read many posts from google searches describing a wait time of "hours to days",
but this will take around 6 weeks

My laptop is circa 2020, not an old machine.
It has been powered on without interruption since 13th Feb
The files are being stored on a dedicated SATA drive.

- Is it normal to take 1-2 months?
- If a platform requires months to install, doesn't that seem a somewhat flawed concept?
- Will Bitcoin Core become unusable in the coming years, when the blockchain size has grown even more?
- Are there any plans in the Bitcoin development cycle to address this problem?

Thank you

[1715509965]

1715509965

[1715509965]

1715509965

[1715509965]

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[pooya87]

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/

[ranochigo]

- Is it normal to take 1-2 months?

No. I synchronized it on my computer with a fairly powerful processor with 6 GB of dbcache and it took about ~8ish hours. It was a stark comparison than when I was synchronizing it with my HDD which took almost a day under similar conditions.

In contrast, I'm running a node on my Intel Atom C2350 server, which is pretty weak in comparison and it took about 5 days with default settings. I don't think most users would want to run a full node if that is their hardware specifications; it'll just be a pain. A tip that I'd give is to increase the dbcache to push more of the data into the ram so that it can be accessed readily while the client goes through IBD.

- If a platform requires months to install, doesn't that seem a somewhat flawed concept?

Most users don't have to use full nodes if all they want is to send some Bitcoins. Full nodes will be better for users but it is not necessary for most. Obviously a tradeoff would be with the privacy and to a certain extent it's security as well.

- Will Bitcoin Core become unusable in the coming years, when the blockchain size has grown even more?

Data storage and it's density are getting better throughout the years. I don't think it's necessary for everyone to be downloading a full node just to use Bitcoin. It can be downloaded while you're doing other things with your computers as well.

- Are there any plans in the Bitcoin development cycle to address this problem?

There has been a series of past changes to Bitcoin Core that has managed to speedup the synchronization exponentially[1]. I don't think I've seen a more recent version of this but there has certainly been much more optimization in the more recent versions.

[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/03/13/performance-optimizations-1/

[HCP]

The files are being stored on a dedicated SATA drive.

This is likely your bottleneck... is that an HDD or an SSD of some description? If it is an HDD, that is definitely your bottleneck... the initial block download involves a LOT of disk I/O... unless you use a sizeable dbcache value, then your storage device will be working overtime... and HDD's are sloooooooooooow when compared to SSD storage.