Quote from: knightdk on December 26, 2015, 12:00:33 AM

Quote from: hamiltino on December 25, 2015, 11:41:00 PM

Quote from: knightdk on December 17, 2015, 03:27:49 AM

Quote from: PatrickMacH on December 17, 2015, 03:09:21 AM

It's a standard zip compressed bootstrap.dat file, combining all blk*.dat files out of the blocks directory.

The actual bootstrap.dat is not compressed. The one you are downloading is, but it isn't the official one that was maintained by jgarzik.

Quote from: PatrickMacH on December 17, 2015, 03:09:21 AM

Maybe we should discuss adding a zip level compression (or better suitable) algorithm to the Bitcoin-Qt client to reduce the amout of data needed to be transferred to update the block chain.

There is talk on the mailing list about block compression and ways to speed up syncing, but I don't think that any of it will be coming in the next release. It either isn't ready or there isn't any particular need for it. Using the actual bootstrap.dat (not the one that you used) is not actually faster than simply letting it sync.

stop talking out of ur ass, im getting speeds up to 5mb/s with the torrent, i can't get anything near this with the client. This has been a huge time saver for me.

I'm not talking out of my ass. From my experience it has been faster to let the client (version 0.10+) sync by itself than it is to download the bootstrap.dat and to import that.

I guess it depends on your location and connection speeds. I still think the torrent is useful for some, not all. It's also nice to have a single file that i can use whenever i need to quickly bootstrap my client. Also when downloading the blockchain with the client i get corrupt database error's all the time, forcing me to constantly reindex the blockchain... what gives?