First: It's NOT recommended to download the blockchain any other way than having Bitcoin Core download it on it's own. Don't do it! Seriously, don't!
Still reading? Well, you'd better know what you're doing, you're on your own now
Download a pruned blockchainI've seen several topics about downloading and pruning
Bitcoin Core. It can take a long time, and you'll need to download about
220 450 GB before it's done. After pruning, you'll only have
a few 5 GB left.
Since I was playing around with a VPS anyway, I now create daily snapshots of the "blocks" and "chainstate" directories.
Download the latest pruned Bitcoin blockchain, unpack it to the right directory, and start your own Bitcoin Core (I'm using v0.18.0.0, older than this may not work). Configure it to prune the blockchain and you're good to go.
It should connect, and update the blocks from there. Once running, you won't need to update it from my server anymore.
This should make it possible to get a pruned and up-to-date Bitcoin Core running in an hour instead of a couple of days (or weeks on some systems).
Which directory to use (source:
stackexchange.com)
Linux:
~/.bitcoin/
MacOS:
~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/
Windows:
%APPDATA%\Bitcoin
While my VPS is still syncing, I'd like to start some discussion about this:
How risky is this?You have to trust not only me, but also my VPS and shared hosting too, and I can't make any guarantees about the last 2. If someone downloads my 550 blocks and his own Bitcoin Core connects and downloads the most recent blocks from there, is that enough to be
fairly certain it's on the real chain?
On Reddit,
theymos wrote this 3 years ago:
This is massively insecure. Bitcoin Core trusts its block database files absolutely. /u/nullc has said that it is not particularly unlikely that a maliciously-modified block database could be used for arbitrary code execution. And even if that's not possible, all sorts of more obvious evil could be done, such as allowing the provider of the block database to create a special killswitch transaction which forks everyone who used his block database, or having everyone who used his block database think that he actually owns 22 million BTC.
Nobody should ever receive block database files from untrusted sources.
Also see:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory#TransferabilitySo again: don't do it!