On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 6:18 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:

A freshly deployed client on an old p4 has been idly crunching away
at building and verifying the initial chain for about a week now. It
should be done in a day or two. This seems rather untenable for
new users. Have any groups published proposals for distributing
a weekly precomputed bootstrap chain?
rsync? db_dump > git > db_load?
There is also 50% or more compression available in the index
and chain.

I have proposed packaging part of the block chain (doesn't even have to be weekly, just until the last checkpoint), but people fear it runs contrary to the distributed approach of Bitcoin.

Which is kind of true:

- If it is imported un-validated, you have to rely on the packager to lie to you (insert false transactions etc)

- If it has to be validated, you win nothing, your computer has to crunch for days anyway

BTW: On such an old computer you should probably use one of the thin clients.

Wladimir