Thanks for your answers.
I found out myself - I simply switched off the internet connection, and it still continued, so it must be bootstrap.dat loading.
Yes, plowing through the bootstrap.dat seems to take hours. 21% done.
We have a slow internet connection, so the bootstrap method usually saves me a factor of ~10.

EDIT: And I would not understand why p2p downloading can be faster, because reading from local HD is much faster than from the internet. Sorry, misunderstood you. Alright, I am also downloading the blockchain.zip now. Perhaps put a clearer warning on the bootstrap page, then I might have noticed when I took the bootstrap.zip, that blockchain.zip would have been the better thing to do.

EDIT2: Done. Blockchain.zip is the way to go. Thanks again.



After finding too many issues with other portfolio services ... I simply created my own.
Your personal copy of my GoogleSheet mastersheet is the frontend: It does all the balance calculations (so I will not learn how rich you are - unless you tell me ). And as a spreadsheet it is completely editable, so maximum flexibility.
And for fast, multi-threading, cached updates of price & other data, I have created my own dataserver backend. It is pulling price data from 13 exchanges, plus market indices from coinmarketcap (very useful numbers), plus minicharts from worldcoinindex (because their base currency is BTC not USD, which renders the minicharts of CMC pretty worthless when USD/BTC is moving).

TL;DR: All YOUR coins on one page. Allows for portfolio approach (balancing each exposure = buy relative low, sell relative high.). Auto-updated prices, totals, markets. Data driven trading. I only look at charts of those of my coins which have just moved. React faster, save time, trade more currencies.

Too many words. Just try it out:    http://AltFolio.ddns.net

Sorry for off-topic. The BCT thread is linked from there too.

Enjoy :-)