1) bootstrap.dat (1,851,231 KB)
the resulting blk0001.dat is 968,000 KB now, but only because I started it already 14 hours ago. So does this really take almost 2 days, even with a bootstrap offline block repository?
Depends on the speed of your computer. I can reload it from bootstrap in about 20-hours on my 5-year-old wallet-store PC. It takes a bit of time to process the 1.8GB of data. Total size is over 2GB today.
2) syncing from scratch, on a 2nd machine.
First there were no peers, but then I added many dozens of them from
https://www.coinexchange.io/network/peers/MINT and finally got ... "6 active connections".
But now it is stuck at block 500. 2830755 to go?
Give it time. A full sync will take a few days. There aren't a lot of peers out there right now, but I'm one of them.