How can the syncing process be optimized?

This is a reference / response to this topic: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/why-does-synchronization-take-so-long-123222 Since I'm not allowed to post there, I'm going to post here.

It just took me 24 hours to get my wallet synced. And I didn't even have to download from scratch... Only since the spring or so...

Using leightweight wallets makes bitcoin suddenly centralized, trust based, etc. so I don't want to switch to one. Like stevegee58 said "Don't trust a centralized server with your data. It defeats the decentralized purpose of BTC."

Is it possible to somehow compress whatever needs to be downloaded, so it doesn't take as long?

Here https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blockchain-download-has-slowed-to-a-crawlfreezes-109956 zvs mentioned "run it with addnode= maxconnections=1". Why is that not a standard option in the client?

I think bitcoin is awesome, I want it to be widely adopted. I just don't see the average computer user being willing to have their computer running for 24 hours just to get it synced, and then again have the client either constantly running or download everything and wait everytime before you wanna make a transaction.

Unlike the rest of the great idea of bitcoin this just doesn't make sense to me :-/

Topic: How can the syncing process be optimized? (Read 548 times)