Topic: Wallet sync is stuck and won't complete (Read 8674 times)

the current blockchain is nearly 20GB
it takes ages to get it all because the cpu checks the blocks so
 its not just the same as downloading 20gb of movies from a fast
server or torrent

i have 20MB/sec dedicated line and it still takes me 1-2 days to get it
and as someone already mentioned ,the closer you get to 100% the longer
the blocks take

i use  multibit for my transactions and its lightening fast but i think the original
client wallet might be safer ?

anyways ,i think its good if  everyone who can does keep a copy of the full blockchain
to  help keep the network secure and provide another node but for beginners making
 transactions multibit is fine imo

Just completed.
3 days!
 

 :-\Doge wallet causes the same problem for me. Since I am a novice I would like to start with less 3 class coins such as doge.

Two days later and it's still only on 89%....is this normal?
Can I do anything to speed it up other than keep re-setting which just seems to take me back to square one.
 

Tried resetting the blockchain and transactions but still reaches 82% and stops.
Any suggestions guys?
 

This thread  is a year old and I now have a Multi Bit wallet sync stuck at 82% for the last two hours.
 

Thanks for the tip, but what IP address should I use then?  I don't understand the purpose of the workaround...?


The client is still stuck and no amount of rebooting the client seems to remove it.

If I as an ex developer and now IT project manager can't cross the technical threshold for this software than honestly I don't know... 
I really wanted to use Bitcoin, but I have only so much patience, faith and time .....

Reminds me of when I wanted to recycle my rubbish after just moving to the UK, but found it just wasn't feasible back then. I had to reluctantly throw away my aluminium cans and batteries. In this case Return to Evil Paypal, Mastercard & co.
 

Oww that really sucks if you are so close -_- ,

maybe you are connected to some slow/notupdated nodes or something, you could
try to connect to a "hub-node" ( http://blockchain.info/hub-nodes ) until you are synced.

Looks like you run windows, so open a terminal go to the bitcoin folder, and then
start it like this:

bitcoin-qt.exe -connect=50.16.70.150

with that it only connects to the ip you give it.

Or use a light client like electrum or multibit...

Note that with the latest "scandal" there were never any bitcoins at risk.

I understand your frustration with the reference client, and I'm sorry that it has turned you off from bitcoin.  Please return and check it out again in the future.  There are some big improvements in development and testing right now.

Edit ----- oh no it's still stuck at 99.11, it's just stopped displaying the progress bar for some reason.

I am soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fed up with this now. It's been a week.

I'll give it one more day, if this client isn't up by then I am dropping bitcoins and return again in 6 months to check if the technology is a bit more user friendly.

Don't feel like using any web client after the latest scandal I read about here.
I want this local client and I want it to work.

Thanks for this amazing response! (above) I'll return to this many times. You explain things so well.

-----------------------------------------------------
More installation problems:

My bitcoin client has stopped displaying the progress bar and I think it actually went through all the blocks (took about 5-6 days, I lost count).

Now it's been doing this (see below) for the last 6 hours....  [feel like banging my head against the wall, I am fed up with this now]

Any idea what this is about and how long it would take for it to finish, or if there is anything I can do to speed it up...?
How can it STILL be out of sync, after all that it was doing for 6 days? What is it doing now?! (see status at bottom).

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/2144/49276302.jpg

No problem.  Everybody is new to bitcoin at some point.

Hmmm, a lot of technical understanding will be needed to grasp the details you are asking about.  Lets start with saying that the value is all represented in the blockchain.  Your wallet just contains the private keys (perhaps think of them as passwords) that allow you request blockchain updates that show that value as associated with someone else's address.

So, If I send 1 BTC to address 1ApeaRCTBuPStVrA1zK2d3xTM5VmDCTaVj.  I send a transaction out into the bitcoin network indicating that 1 BTC worth of the value that I control is no longer under my control, but is now to be considered under control of whoever has the private key to that address instead.  My bitcoin client signs this transaction with the private key from my "wallet" (in the case of the reference client this is a file named wallet.dat) and everybody in the entire network can verify that signature against my previous ownership of that value.  At that point nobody (including me) can spend that particular 1 BTC of value (lets ignore double-spend attacks for now) unless they have the private key that is associated with the new address that my transaction indicated.  If nobody has the private key, then that 1 BTC will never again be spent (so losing a wallet.dat in a disk crash means permanently losing access to your bitcoins unless you've backed it up).

Note that you don't have to be running your client at the time I place the transaction for it to succeed.  If you ran a program that knew the proper format of a private key and how to mathematically generate a bitcoin address from that value, you could tell me the bitcoin address and print out the private key on a piece of paper.  I could still send my transaction into the bitcoin network indicating that a signature from a private key associated with the address is needed to re-spend the value, even though the address you gave me has never been seen on the bitcoin network prior to my transaction.  Then at a later date if you could find a way to import your printed private key into a client you could spend the value. (This is what people are talking about when they talk about "paper wallets")

Since your client generates your addresses, it also generates the necessary private keys and stores them.  This means that (unless you share the private keys hidden in your wallet - or they are stolen) you are the only person who can create a new transaction that uses any particular value that has been transferred to an address your client creates.

Eventually a miner adds these broadcast transactions to the blockchain, and there is a permanent record of the transfers having happened.

So, you don't really have an "account".  What you have is a set of "addresses" that you can give to others so they can send transactions containing value into the network that you can forward on to others with your own transactions using signatures associated with the addresses.  The client takes care of keeping track of which signatures are needed when creating a new transaction and keeps track of all the transactions in the blockchain that indicate value transferred to you.  When you see an indication in your client of the amount of "bitcoins" you have, what the client is doing is adding up all the unspent value in all the transactions on the network (and in the blockchain) and showing you the total.

You can create as many addresses as you like. There are even programs out there that will continuously create addresses as fast as possible and check to see if the created address matches a pattern (such as starting with 1Freja...) throwing away all the addresses that don't match.  When it finally finds an address that matches the pattern, it will give you the private key so you can import it into a client and have your own "vanity address".

So the idea behind a unique addresses for a transaction is generally suggested when giving out an address for someone (or some program, or some currency exchange) to send you bitcoin.  This way the person (or people) who now know one of your addresses (since you just gave it to them) don't know what other addresses you have access to and therefore don't know how much bitcoin value you control or where you are sending bitcoin value that you've received from others.  It offers a small amount of token anonymity.  If you are truly concerned about privacy and anonymity you'll need to do a lot more than that.

Assuming that you have all your bitcoin addresses on your computer, at this point it is too late.  They have (from your computer) a list of ALL your addresses and therefore can trace every bitcoin transaction you have ever made (assuming you haven't deleted any addresses/private keys from the client).

Here is an example where anonymity could come in handy...

Say you run a blog or YouTube channel or some other situation where you list a bitcoin address for anyone to send you some bitcoins if they like the content you offer.  Clearly this address is publicly known.  Now say you have converted £10,000 into bitcoin at an exchange and transferred it to the same address.  You decide you want to make some sort of purchase, and are engaged in negotiations with a seller.  The seller seeing the address from your YouTube channel (or whatever) knows exactly how much bitcoin you have available to spend.  This gives him an edge in the negotiations.

Using bitcoin without knowing how to carefully maintain complete anonymity will still be vulnerable to forensic accounting processes and you should assume that the police can track down your identity if they have reason to target you.  If that level of anonymity is important to you (even if you are doing nothing illegal and just value your privacy), then you'll need to learn quite a bit more about obtaining, securing, and spending bitcoin anonymously.

Well, they could determine exactly what addresses you sent bitcoin to (or received from) and how much you sent to (or received from) each address, but they'd still have to do the legwork to try and determine who has the private keys associated with any of those addresses.  Some will be public knowledge or easy to find, other addresses may only have been used a single time by the person you engaged in the transaction with and therefore there is no further trace as to who specifically you gave the money to or received it from.

It comes down to the ability of someone else to determine who has the private key associated with a particular address.  Every time you give out an address for someone to send you bitcoins, that person knows that you have the private key associated with that address and knows that any other money sent to or from that address was sent to or from you.

You really explain things very well - I get it!   

Sorry for coming on here and whingeing about the time it takes to synch. I realise bitcoin is the work of genius and that this is birthing pains or whatever, and a small price to pay... just irritated that I have to wait.

But say I want to keep an account ready with some money for small expenses online. Like paying this usenet site that I mentioned, paying a membership for a club and a bit of this and that.....

To achieve that, I want to transfer money onto an "account". Is the account the Wallet (parent in the relationship) or the Address (child in the relationship).

Say my wallet is called "Freja's wallet".
blockchain says my address is: 1ApeaRCTBuPStVrA1zK2d3xTM5VmDCTaVj  (not real address)

Where is the money/value stored? I thought it was in the address? Or could I put £100 in the wallet and transfer it over to unique addresses as and when I needed?

And say that I become suspected of terrorism and the police turns up and seizes my computer.  They figure out that my address was the one I gave above. I had not been following the advice you gave, but used the same address for everything. They could then (if they were clued up) read my financial history as easily as if they had my Visa statement.....?!!

If so, I'll definitely use unique addresses!

But the privacy and safety then comes down to human error and/or access to a physical machine or somewhere where the user has saved the data.


 

Exactly.

Because the blockchain (which stores all transaction history since the beginning of bitcoin's existence) is a publicly shared file, if you know a bitcoin address, you can see all transactions that have ever been sent to or from that address.

You can see here that the person who has the bitcoin address of 1ntp98QCoiMxLnn3iSjxWdff1cPMGnPAR likes to play SatoshiDice:

http://blockchain.info/address/1ntp98QCoiMxLnn3iSjxWdff1cPMGnPAR

You can see a complete list of all the transactions they have ever sent or received from the 1ntp98QCoiMxLnn3iSjxWdff1cPMGnPAR address.  Since you and I don't know who owns that address, they have some anonymity.

If you give me a bitcoin address so that I can send you some money, and then give that same address to everyone else who sends you money, then I will be able to tell exactly how much bitcoin you have received and how much of it you have spent so far.  If I know the bitcoin addresses of any of the people who are sending you bitcoins, then I'd know who was sending it and how much they sent.

With some effort bitcoin addresses can still often be linked together, so if true anonymity/privacy are really important to you, you'll want to learn a bit more about how bitcoin creates transactions and how to avoid having a transaction link multiple addresses of yours together.  But the simple action of having a separate bitcoin address for each transaction where you receive bitcoins goes a long way toward maintaining a reasonable amount of anonymity from casual inspection of your address/transactions.

Obviously you are neither the first person to notice the issue, nor the first person to mention it.  I suspect that nearly EVERY TIME someone installs the Bitcoin-Qt client without first understanding what they are about to undertake, the next thing they do is come to the forum to complain about how long it takes.  Certainly there are people looking into ways to improve on this.  One of the more promising efforts underway involves pruning unneeded information from the blockchain to significantly reduce it's size.  See these discussions for more technical information:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ultimate-blockchain-compression-w-trust-free-lite-nodes-88208

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/experimental-pre-08-builds-for-testing-129861

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ultraprune-merged-in-mainline-119525

Again, thanks for all that really clear and solid info. I understand.



So I'd have ONE wallet somewhere, then attach different bitcoin addresses to it?
If that's best practice, I'll do it, and yes, I believe in privacy, although I am not super paranoid. But payments to a particular cause I believe in, payment for filesharing activities and whatever else I want to do in the future is nothing that my bank (and whoever accesses their records) needs to know about.

Great to know about the plugins and other ways to protect yourself.

It's taken the QT client over 5 hours to go from 16,000 to 15,100 blocks remaining. In light of it's getting increasingly slower this is exponential at this point... There is simply no telling how long the client will need. Does anyone keep an eye on the situation with this, or actually care? Or did you all set up your clients years ago and shrug at what's going on with newbies? I realise that not much can be done, but if this is just going to get worse in the future, then it's untenable.

I'd say 99% of non-geeky people would have dropped off a LONG time ago. I'm sticking with it, but for all I know right now I might not be done until after New Year's. Those last 1000 might take a week.

When running the Bitcoin-Qt local client you are contributing to the robustness of the bitcoin network because your client is one more node validating and relaying transactions.  When you run a web wallet you are not contributing in this way.

Also, when using a web wallet, there is a slight possibility that a hacker could see the web wallet provider as a high value target since they handle transactions for so many people.  With blockchain.info, you run the risk that a hacker could take over their site and put up fake web pages that trick you into providing them access to all the coins in your wallet.  You also run the risk that the owners/operators of blockchain.info suddenly decide to try and steal bitcoins from their users and put up "updated" web pages that allow them to gain access to your coins and steal them.

There are browser plug-ins that validate the content of blockchain.info's web pages to make sure that your aren't using fake page designed to steal your bitcoins.  If you are going to maintain a significant amount of bitcoins there, I'd suggest using their wallet backup service (in case they shut down) and the browser plug-in (to protect your coins from theft).


I thought blockchain.info provided a way to import a Bitcoin-Qt wallet.  However, if you've decided to abandon the Bitcoin-Qt client completely, and haven't had any bitcoins sent to that address yet, then you don't need to worry about that address.  You can just abandon it and use the blockchain.info wallet instead.

If you are planning on temporarily using the blockchain.info wallet, with the possibility of using the Bitcoin-Qt wallet later, then I'd keep the 2 separate.  If/when you decide to switch to the Bitcoin-Qt wallet, you can always send the bitcoins that you have at your blockchain.info wallet to the address of your Bitcoin-Qt wallet and then abandon your blockchain.info wallet.

It is a "bad idea" to try to run both a blockchain.info wallet and a Bitcoin-Qt wallet with the same bitcoin addresses in both.  The only reason I'd suggest importing your Bitcoin-Qt wallet into your new blockchain.info wallet would be if you have already given out your Bitcoin-Qt address to someone and are expecting coins to be sent to that address.  That way those coins would show up in your blockchain.info wallet.

Note: For the purposes of increased anonymity it is generally recommended that you use a different bitcoin address every time you receive bitcoins.  If you follow this advice you'll get used to having more than one bitcoin address no matter what wallet you use.

Thanks a lot for the very helpful response. 
I'll certainly consider all your feedback.

I found the wallet address, like you said.
I'll look into online wallets, it makes sense to try that.

What would you say were the advantages of running the local client over anything web based? (at the speed it's going now, it's probably another 3-4 days.... at least.... I'm letting it run, but frankly at the moment it feels hopeless)

Edit: I opened an account at bitchain.info but it's got a different address than the one that's set up in my bitcoin-qt client.
I would prefer to have just one account. But there was no way of changing it on bitchain.info, that I could see.

You can do that, but then you end up with this long download and "synchronization" process.  You could take a little time to learn first, and possibly save yourself quite a bit of frustration.

Downloading "all these blocks" allows the software to verify the history of all the coins that your client receives and/or relays.  If you install a "light" client or use a web based wallet, then you are depending on others to run the necessary software to verify transactions.

Yep, early blocks were mostly empty because bitcoin hadn't caught on much yet.  Then as more people started using it, the later blocks started getting more and more transactions in them creating more for your computer to validate.  Earlier this year, SatoshiDice came online and was very popular.  Because of this microtransaction gambling service, the number of transactions per day increased significantly meaning even more for your computer to validate in each block.  Then people started creating gambling bots that could generate many SatosiDice transactions per second.  The synchronization process gets slower (per block) as it encounters an increase in transactions.

I don't remember if the more common bottleneck is disk access speeds or CPU.  Either way, the computer is going to be working hard to confirm the provenience of all those transactions.
 
Your gender really has no bearing on this conversation.

That is a risk you take when you start something that you don't understand without putting a little effort into learning a bit about it first.

While it is downloading and processing, you should still be able to click on the "Receive coins" tab to see the bitcoin address that the wallet set up and to generate additional addresses.  While you are waiting for your stand-alone reference client to finish synchronizing, you might want to look into quickly setting up a blockchain.info web wallet.  It should take less than 5 minutes.  Then you'll have an address where you can receive and start using bitcoins right away.  That way you don't have to wait for the synchronization before you can even get started on anything else.  Once your Bitcoin-Qt reference client is synchronized you can send the bitcoins that you have from your blockchain.info wallet to an address from your your synchronized wallet if that is what you decide you want to use.

Note: After your Bitcoin-Qt client is fully synchronized, if you turn off your computer, or shut down the client for any length of time it will fall behind on the blockchain as additional blocks are created that you are not receiving.  When you start the client back up, it will begin synchronizing again.  It won't take nearly as long (right now you are synchronizing 4 years of blockchain).  But you can probably expect it to take minutes of synchronization per day of being offline.

Nope... I didn't have the inclination to do lots of research until after the software was up and running so to speak. So I just went for what I perceived to be the official client.

Basically I thought (like you normally do) I install the software FIRST and then learn about it when I have it in front of me.
I'll read up on the other clients you mention but I assume that there is a benefit with downloading all these blocks, or this client wouldn't do it! Or is it simply the difference between a web based architecture and client/server with a local fat client? 

Well, I now have 16,285 blocks left. 
At this speed, it's another 2 days!
Seems like the further you get, the slower it gets.
Does this come down to the CPU or what? This is a good spec machine with a CPU that was top of the range 1.5 years ago.

I happen to be a technical person, and I strongly believe in what bitcoin stands for. No pain, no gain and I will persevere.

But I am also: A regular internet user who just wanted to pay a subscription; A girl; Someone who normally don't have anywhere the amount of time disposable that I have now spent on this. And as such, I am thoroughly fed up now!

This is before I've even attempted to buy Bitcoins here in the UK (just moved here from another country) I do not have a "Barclay's Pingit" and I don't want to get one right now. Everything else seems a bit dodgy or complicated, although it's probably the route I'll have to take.

But before that; 2 more days of just waiting!
While it's downloading and processing I don't even know what my wallet number is.

Wild guess here: because it's the only one on the bitcoin website. Everyone of course will use it. To discover multibit you have to check the forums, check the alternative client section and read the multibit thread. One would expect alternative clients to be just alternative, not so different  I too started using a lightweight client only in these last weeks.