I’ve recently opened up a Litecoin Wallet. It started out with having to Sync everything to the network. That took 15-20 relaunches because Litecoin Core was always stuck syncing everything.
Now it has about 2.5 Million blocks left to syncronize with the Network, and it would take about 6-8 days to finish this.
Why exactly must I go through this process? I wanted to withdraw 2.5$ worth of litecoin onto this wallet, and now I need to sync this for literally days?
Image for reference - can I speed this up? or is this a must?
It is a must. Before Litecoin Core can transact, it needs the whole blockchain downloaded first, usually referred to as the initial block download. That faster your CPU and disk I/O, the more quickly this process completes. The internet connection speed is important too (DSL is fine) but the CPU really makes the difference between hours or days, in my experience.
If you had more money in play, I would offer to mail a USB stick of the whole blockchain that you could copy to your computer. If you have a faster computer, or a friend has a faster computer, you could copy it to your computer after it’s all downloaded on their machine. I run a node on a Raspberry Pi 4 which is very slow at initial block downloads but does a fine job keeping up with the blockchain once the blockchain is all there.
Ah I see. It finished after 10-12 Hours roughly, so all good. But are the 130GB of Disk Space mandatory in the AppData Folder? Or can I do something about it?
That’s a reasonable time to wait for downloading the blockchain. Incidentally, Bitcoin takes much longer as it is much larger and more complex.
Anyway, the 130 GB of disk space can be reduced by pruning. The size can be reduced in 1 GB increments from 130 down to 2 GB. Open the Settings menu and select Options. You should see what is on the attached screenshot. Unfortunately the blockchain will need to be downloaded again.
Once the download is complete for the pruned setup, Core will continue to update the blockchain and keep the size at the pruned setting. That means only the most recent transactions are stored on your computer that will fit within the pruned setting.
