Block DL speeds insanely slow #1391

Hey,

Thanks for a great app. But you seriously have to do something about your servers bandwith. Yesterday it took a friend i recommended your program more than 4,5 hours to sync the blocks after installation. I dont know where your servers are located (and on what bandwith), but perhaps you should get some in Europe if you dont already have some?. My friend and i are both located in Denmark and have 20/2 mb net connections.

Everytime i open the app (approx. once a day) i have to wait a min. of 10 minutes to sync blocks. Thats simply unacceptable in 2012.

Please se what you can do about this?

Br

Bitcoin has no "servers" - it is a peer to peer application that depends on other nodes willing to send you the block chain. A lot depends on which node is selected at startup to synchronize with. Other than that, downloading is not the most time-intensive part usually, rather verifying and indexing all retrieved data is.

The reference client on bitcoin.org is one that does full validation - i.e. does not require any trust in what peers send it - this is difficult but is what makes bitcoin unique. These fully validating nodes are necessary on the network, but not everyone has to run them. There are other applications (like MultiBit) which do not do full validation, and move some minimal responsibility to the network.

There is some work already around idea of making the reference client startup in simplified verification mode (which synchronizes very quickly), and then do the full synchronization in the background until it can switch to fully validating mode.

Closing this as a duplicate of issue#7