I keep coming back to this idea: Initial Block Download By Mail (IBDBM)
Basically, you get shipped a 1TB microSD card with the #Bitcoin blockchain data from the Genesis block to date.
Discussion
might as well be an NVMe... not much more expensive and you can just use it as your ,bitcoin folder
Don't like it, sounds like it could be tampered with. You would need download the entire chain anyway just to validate.
When you spin up a new node, you are not merely downloading the blockchain. Your node is re-living the entire history of bitcoin, validating every transaction, block, and fork.
True. Having the data doesn’t alleviate your need to run the verification.
The way I’m thinking about it is like having a very fast peer. So you still initialize your node as always, but you have a super fast peer right next to you feeding you historical blocks.
Good concept but bad (thought) implementation imo
If you do go through with this, I'd like to see many separate pieces be distributed to you over time, like;
- the first 10,000 blocks mailed to you (can be email too)
- then connect to this node and verify those headers
- wait to receive the next section of blocks
- repeat