Where did the torrent blockchain site go?

I’m trying to sync the blockchain on my old laptop with Debian + Raspiblitz and it’s super slow. There used to be a site to download the whole blockchain via torrent. What’s up with that? Is there anything similar now? Thanks!

I have a fiber optic connection (300 mbps), so it’d take me around 5 hours at full speed to download the blockchain, which is like 550 GB now.

Best bet is to grab the Bitcoin Core wallet and sync it with the blockchain. Just make sure to verify it before using. Torrenting the blockchain can be sketchy, you never know what you might get. If you don’t need a full node, check out Electrum.

Torrents are out there if you search, but I wouldn’t trust them enough to share links. The slowest part is the validation process. When you use Core, it validates during the sync, but if you download via torrent, validation only starts after the download is complete. So, yeah, be careful with torrents.

What’s your system setup like? An SSD will definitely speed things up compared to an HDD. Running it on a 2nd gen i3 will be way slower than a newer 6th gen i7. And how much RAM you got?

I have a 2009 Toshiba laptop, not exactly powerful. Specs: 2 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM, and HDD. I switched the HDD to an HP Elite 8300 SFF and it’s performing better now: 3.4 GHz CPU (boosts to 3.9 GHz) and 16 GB RAM.

You might wanna tweak the dbcache settings in your config file for the initial block download now that you’ve got more RAM. With 16 GB, you can safely set dbcache=8000. After the first sync, you can comment that line out.

It’ll work, but it’s gonna be slow. If you don’t have any reason to avoid Electrum, I’d steer clear of Bitcoin Core on that hardware. Seriously, getting an SSD would be the best upgrade ever. If you have one, move your chainstate directory there it’ll make a huge difference.