[Joeboy]

> I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is.

I'm trying to cash out some of mine and I've been downloading the blockchain for four days now. I had to buy a new hard drive before I could even start. I've read that it takes over an hour to do a transaction now, although I'm not yet in a position to verify that. If you look on the btc related subreddits nobody recommends using a proper client as Satoshi intended, it's all about accounts on websites offering a service that could reasonably be described as "banking".

[uncoder0]

Took me a few hours. Use `-dbcache=n` where n = bytes of memory... will make sync super fast if you have +8GB of RAM. I think default is pretty low.

[Joeboy]

Ah cool, I set it to 4000 and it looks to have sped it up a bit (currently saying 16 hours to go, down from "two days"). I'm still not convinced it's a very practical decentralized currency though.

[vesak]

Check out https://electrum.org/#home -- doesn't require clients to download the full blockchain.

[Joeboy]

(Actually it's back up to two days now, I think it might just be that the break in downloading made my ISP unthrottle my connection).