Topic: [CHALLENGE] Run A Bitcoin Node: 14 Days To 14 Merits - page 136. (Read 31466 times)

Thank you so much. This is very unfortunate for me because I am not currently using WiFi but my mobile data plan. Which for sure can’t take me that far, or will be too expensive for me. but I would have loved to do this. Even if not for the merit, for the fun of doing it.

At least 570 GB.

Hey Loyce. I’m a little confused. Let me ask a direct question: how much of internet data would this require. The 14 days and all downloads? I am really interested in this as I have a capable computer and enough SSD space (external). And it wouldn’t hurt to make some merits (even though I want to do it to learn more).

Right, understood, thank you!
Yeah, it's been really slow the past few hours, progress per hour has dropped from 1.5% to 0.5%, still a long way to go. Set pruning to 35 GB, will see how it progresses and will consider reverting back to 45 GB tomorrow.

Not sure if this counts as the first day or the second, it's fine either way.
Quoting the "getblockchaininfo" command's results below.

Beat me, I'm using a 10 year old refurbished HP ProBook, 4th generation i5 but 12 GB of ram.

You have the GUI-client running, not the daemon. So click Window > Console, and enter getblockchaininfo there. Don't use bitcoin-cli with the GUI.

I would set it to 4096. But if the rest of your system needs RAM too, it's going to slow down everything with active swapping.

It could be a problem wasn't noticed before until the system was under heavy load.

I have 8GB RAM. How much dbcache should I choose then? Yup, it's taking a long timeeee...(Running it nonstop for 7-8 hours)

Currently at:

Block: 553667
Progress: 3%
Per hour: 0.50-0.60%
Time left: 6-7 days

So is there any risk of damaging hardware/device? Mine is 4-5 years old. I'm totally running it out of curiosity. It's my first time. 

Thank you. I'll stick to 45 GB for now and see how it progresses in the upcoming days. If everything is going smoothly, I'll switch it to 100 or 200 GB.

Something I haven't understood though, I've never used Bitcoin Core in the past and this is all new to me, so excuse me if I'm asking dumb questions. I have the client running, go to CMD to run the command "bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo" that Tether has mentioned in the original post, but receive this error.


Have I understood something incorrectly?

Here's the client running



Supposedly, it'll only take 3 more days.

I do like encouraging people to run Bitcoin Core, but why start with CLI? I wouldn't start with bitcoind, but use the GUI version (bitcoin-qt) instead. It's much easier to use.

I have 2 drives in my laptop too, and both can be upgraded 700 GB SSD is most likely enough to run anything you want smoothly, while the HDD can be as big as you want for storage at low cost. But don't make the mistake I made, and don't get a disk that gets very, very slow when writing a lot. Also: chainstate on SSD, blocks on HDD works fine.

So you're saying I can't sell Bitcoin Core screenshots?

It's called a blockchain for a reason. Bitcoin Core knows the genesis block, and the only way to know that you're on the right chain without trusting any third party is by verifying all blocks on your own.

My current blocks directory is 570 GB. At 5 Mbit max, it's going to take at least 10 days. Don't do this if you have a data limit.

By all means, do it: Bitcoin Core download: the cheapest pay-per-hour VPS I found! If someone goes through the trouble of learning how to setup a VPS and bitcoind, that's worth the Merits. I paid $0.50 for a full blockchain download last year.

With 450 MB dbcache, this is going to take a long time. If you have the RAM, you should largely increase this (4096 or even 8192, but don't make it more than half your RAM).

I created such service years ago: Bitcoin Core pruned blockchain: download it here! (DON'T DO THIS!). But don't do this

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New Bitcoin Core users: don't underestimate the hardware demands from Bitcoin Core. Considering chainstate is currently 9.6 GB in size (it grew a lot thanks to the Ordinal spam), I don't think you should attempt to run Bitcoin Core with 8 GB RAM anymore. It's going to be very slow.

Yes absolutely, although your client won't go back and download old blocks; rather it will just stop pruning until you hit your new limit.

So let's say you had set your prune limit to 50 GB. You have downloaded and verified the first 200 GB of the blockchain, meaning the first 150 GB has been pruned, and you are storing the next 50 GB. If you now change your prune limit to 100 GB, your client won't go back to redownload blocks you already downloaded and pruned, but will instead just not prune anything until you hit your new prune limit of 100 GB, which you will reach once you are 250 GB through the initial block download.

In the Core GUI you just click on Settings -> Options, and the option to change the prune limit is there.

Yeah, it is; it was showing 10 to 12 days after a while. I'm not sure if I can keep my laptop running 24/7 for so many days, but I'll give it a go after I return from work. Right now, I've set pruning to 45 GB; can I change that afterwards? If I see decent progress, I don't mind setting it to 100 GB. I have approximately 200 GB of space on my SSD, and the HDD is quite full, but my main concern remains my internet, as its speed is quite unstable.

Progress:

After running the bitcoin core I understood what you were trying to say. Exactly it's notoriously unreliable. First it showed me 12 fricking years. More than a decade. But as time went by it gradually started to drop. From 12 years, it went 10, 9, 8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 years and lastly stuck at 2 weeks now. Lol  .

It's not true, try search "pruned bitcoin snapshot" on DuckDuckGo and you'll find few website data created a year ago or more recent.


At least for Bitcoin Core, you need to download whole blockchain to verify almost everything and build UTXO set.

when did you start mine is just 4 years remaining I think it has something to do with your internet connection 49% in progress

Did it worked? Have I done everything correctly? It's my first time running a node, so correct me if I'm wrong anywhere. I haven't touched any settings. Everything shown in the images were the default ones. Should I change anything? Also I'm not really sure if my bandwidth connection is fit for running a node, as you see it says 30MB for 2 minutes,lol (I know it's very slow, can't really help with that). At least I'm trying.....

DAY 1

1st day:

4 years and 24weeks reaming until sync

Haha. I have always found the "estimated time left" on Core to be notoriously unreliable. Assuming you are downloading at least 1 MB/s (12 Mbps should give you 1.5 MB/s as a theoretical maximum), then it should take around 150 hours to download the ~540 GB blockchain, which is the equivalent of 6.25 days if you run non-stop (assuming as well that your hardware can keep up with its speed of verification).

Right, I was mostly referring to the pruning part and not the downloading a snapshot from a third party, but didn't refer to that in my initial post.
You don't need to store the full 500 GB while performing the initial block download. If you set to prune at 50 GB, then it will only ever keep 50 GB on disk despite downloading the full 500 GB.
I've started downloading Bitcoin Core now, and I've set the prune block storage to 50 GB. Unfortunately, storage capacity isn't my main issue, but my internet's limited capabilities. I used to have over 50 Mbps on my previous house; now I'm getting 10 or 12 at most. Otherwise, I wouldn't mind if I downloaded as much as 200 GB of data.



No worries, it'll be finished in a few years 

Lol think about the bandwidth charges they will have to pay, some ISPs limit their download bandwidth and would charge extra for each Gig of data after the limit has reached.
Anyways, still no answer as to why I need to first download the entire chain just to discard most of it later? Maybe because I suffer from a mental retardness? Lol.

Also, this could be considered as merit buying, think about it, one could pay for a VPS and just like that farm 14 + some extra on top from you and other generous sources. So think about a solution to stop such abuses. 🤓

1. Download Bitcoin Core from https://bitcoincore.org or bitcoin.org and then either run the bitcoind application in the terminal or click on bitcoin-qt for a graphical screen.
2. Use pruning, see above.
3. It should not affect Bitcoin Core because it will just resume where it left off after a connection interrupt.
4. I'm not sure whether 5mbps can download the blockchain in 14 days but this is supposed to be running 24/7, so maybe someone can do the napkin math here and work out how many days that would take.

Edit: the theoretical maximum is 756GB in that timeframe. You should be fine.