Comment by DSMan195276 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DSMan195276 | Hacker News Reader

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20GB still isn't something to scoff at if it wants wide-spread adoption. It's huge when you consider that anybody who wants to attempt to run Bitcoin has to download all 20GB just to get things installed. I have approximately a 1.5MB download speed. The space on my HD I can live without, but I gave-up trying to get the bitcoin-qt program to sync after about a week (I ran it mostly non-stop - I obviously wasn't getting anywhere near 1.5MB down, syncing the block-chain is slow) and just bought the little bitcoin I wanted straight into an exchange and then bought the other coins I was planning to buy anyway so I didn't have to mess with bitcoin myself.

The fact is, in it's current state the huge block-chain makes bitcoin anything but user-friendly.

You don't have to download the whole block-chain to use bitcoin.

While true, I don't believe many clients make it easy to do that still.

Nearly every mobile client does not download the blockchain and instead uses SPV (Simple Payment Verification / headers only mode) or relies on a trusted server for block information.

Electrum and MultiBit on the desktop are SPV clients.

Ah I didn't know about them. I'll have to check them out, I've had annoyances in the past because i never leave bitcoin-qt open to keep it in sync.

This.

If you don't want to wait a week or more to download the blockchain within the bitcoin program, there is a torrent to bootstrap the blockchain for new installations, last updated in April:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

That will get you up to April, then bitcoin the software will sync the remaining blocks up to the latest.

Download a lightweight wallet that support SPV such Multibit. That doesn't download the full block chain.

A) You don't need the whole blockchain on your regular PC.

B) If you're talking about running a node, even my shitty cheap VPN has a gigabit connection. It would take only (20GB/1 Gbit/s) = 2 minutes 20 seconds to download it.

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