Bitcoin QT long time to sync
- Would increasing block size significantly increase resources other than disk space and network throughput?
- Is there some basis other than intuition that the lack of full nodes is primarily a result of resource consumption?
- Are the number of full nodes really a potential / real problem?
My intuition, and small sample size study is that people don't choose the QT wallet not because of the resources--now that it is synced, it sits here running virtually unnoticed on my mid-grade laptop with mid-tier broadband--but rather the start up time to use it the first time.
People are lazy and prone to inertia. They want to use bitcoin for their first time; so they use electrum or blockchain.info because it works "right now" and never switch.
Has there been any type of proposal considered turning bitcoin-qt into a sort of hybrid wallet? Something that would allow bitcoin-qt and bitcoind nodes to communicate with each other about balances of certain addresses?
It seems to me this could be done in a very light manner; asking only for balances of the addresses used in transactions since syncing (for wallet importing) and for addresses displayed to the user in the 'Receive' tab (most important).
Perhaps I am underestimating?
I assume the bitcoin-qt doesn't allow spending until the blockchain has been fully synced as a way of discouraging double spends by amateurs. Perhaps there is another reason as well? That is, what would be the downside to letting the "local" bitcoin-qt be more lenient with transaction creation but perfectly strict with "other node" propagation?
I say all this for a couple reasons
- I would like to see people encouraged away from online wallets.
- I wonder if the resitance to increasing the blocksize is genuinely based in the reality of the user base.
- It is super annoying to wait almost a full day, even using the bootstrap.dat torrent to use bitcoin-qt. And I myself have intertia and like to use it.
