Bitcoin QT loading block Index

Word on the street is that the latest, 0.8-est release of the ‘official’ reference client is out, with some moves to start addressing the scalability of the Bitcoin transaction database, by the looks of it. . Here’s the full info from the mailing list:

Bitcoin-Qt version 0.8.0 are now available from: This is a major release designed to improve performance and handle the increasing volume of transactions on the network. Please report bugs using the issue tracker at github: How to Upgrade -------------- If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux). The first time you run after the upgrade a re-indexing process will be started that will take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the speed of your machine. Incompatible Changes -------------------- This release no longer maintains a full index of historical transaction ids by default, so looking up an arbitrary transaction using the getrawtransaction RPC call will not work. If you need that functionality, you must run once with -txindex=1 -reindex=1 to rebuild block-chain indices (see below for more details). Improvements ------------ Mac and Windows binaries are signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin Foundation, to be compatible with the new security features in OSX 10.8 and Windows 8. LevelDB, a fast, open-source, non-relational database from Google, is now used to store transaction and block indices. LevelDB works much better on machines with slow I/O and is faster in general. Berkeley DB is now only used for the wallet.dat file (public and private wallet keys and transactions relevant to you). Pieter Wuille implemented many optimizations to the way transactions are verified, so a running, synchronized node uses less working memory and does much less I/O. He also implemented parallel signature checking, so if you have a multi-CPU machine all CPUs will be used to verify transactions. New Features ------------ "Bloom filter" support in the network protocol for sending only relevant transactions to lightweight clients. contrib/verifysfbinaries is a shell-script to verify that the binary downloads at sourceforge have not been tampered with. If you are able, you can help make