Re: Block chain size/storage and slow downloads for new users

Took me four full days to download the BTC blockchain.
For newcomers and widespread adoption that isnt to hot actually..

I'm surprised it wasn't longer than that if you downloaded it recently, personally. I downloaded the Blockchain back in June of last year and it took me about 3 full days, and that was when it was "only" 9 GB.

I'm having to do some troubleshooting stuff to recover my computer from a virus I had earlier, enough that it may end up wiping my drive knowing how messed up Windows is. Is the blockchain BitTorrent still being maintained? I'm just wondering because I need to know if I need to make a backup of the blockchain on my hard drive.

You can upgrade your computer to SSD if possible. The read and write speeds are significantly faster. The Blockchain snapshot on the BitTorrent is still available but you may need sometime for it to sync as it isn't the newest snapshot.

whats a blockchain bittorrent?? i just started syncing and its so slow. is that something to speed up sync?

It is basically the Bitcoin Blockchain file on torrent. By downloading the blockchain using Torrent and put in your bitcoin datafolder, you can speed up sync. This process skips the CPU verification part and the problems of having slow peers by connecting to lots of peer. Take note that the first start up will still take sometime as the client still needs to verify the blocks. Since the blockchain file on torrent was created sometime ago, you still have to synchronize with the network for sometime. Here's the full tutorial https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/bootstrap.md