Packing up..

I've compiled bitcoind and bitcoin-qt from source on Ubuntu 14.04. I mostly do that, but I was lazy this time so I got the canned version. I should've known better. Then I downloaded bootstrap.dat via Torrent and cleaned my system as to avoid any circumstance that could make things go FUBAR, and ran bitcoind. Nice, it worked: bitcoind was loading blocks from bootstrap.dat, and it seemed to work like a charm. No more corruption of the database like with the canned bitcoind. Good. When bitcoind finished loading from bootstrap.dat on block 31700, I stopped bitcoind. Then I ran bitcoin-qt . To read..: "No block source available. 1 year and 32 weeks behind." "19 active connections to the Bitcoin network," and "Catching up... Processed 232045 blocks of transaction history. ... " I know that my node seemed to be misbehaving because I had to reload the same blocks after every time the canned bitcoind seemed to corrupt the blockchain database. I have never ever experienced this with a self-compiled version of either bitcoind, or bitcoin-qt. Last night I pulled my blocks from famous 173.236.158.177, the blockchain database crashed a few times, and so I'm given no quarters anymore.

Can you see a newbie struggling with this? He or she doesn't want to be a programmer or systems expert, he or she just want to adopt this cool new fad.. Yeah, it shot up to $1,000 - hello.. geek millionaires - from nothing, and then crashed to like $275 - hello.. people who lost an arm and a leg - something, but hey people seem to think it's viable. Well, this single experience tells me that it is not. This is not a serious global payment system, decentralized or not. This is hobby stuff. And while fiat value - hey.. they CPU mined bitcoin - for some is still good, this is going nowhere really fast. I don't mean that bitcoin will disappear, because let's face it there is a lot of real money put in.. But like this? Like this one experience I am having now, after all these years? Just going it from the seat of my pants one time? Dudes, you are delusional..

Ok.. I will say it. This actually IRL screwed me over. Ok? There, now you can gloat. Another one bites the dust never to come back again. Happy now? Good.