Nostr Web Client

Question to the Bitcoin wizards out there. Why do I need to sync the entire Bitcoin blockchain if all I want is to create a new wallet and receive in that wallet? Can't the deamon be syncing in the background while my new wallet is good to go?

Relatively Irrelevant 5mo ago 💬 4

You are asking a Full Node vs Pruned Node question.

Full Nodes contain a full copy of all transactions and validated the chain of hashes from the genesis block to today.

Pruned Nodes contain a rolling subset of transactions, dropping the oldest blocks to free up disk space.

Both, however, go through the process of downloading all blocks and independently verifying the chain of hashes from the first block to the most current. Pruned nodes simply start discarding the oldest blocks to free up disk space or meet configured requirements.

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Discussion

Vitor Pamplona 5mo ago

It's even before that. If all I want is to create a new wallet then all I need is to create, receive and then the software can save the wallet and do a prune in everything but the wallet

Kevin's Bacon 5mo ago 💬 1

I don't know why people are unable to understand your question. It was pretty obvious to me.

Vitor Pamplona 5mo ago

The more one knows, the harder it is to reply to simple ideas

Kevin's Bacon 5mo ago

Maybe for other people but not for me. I actually focus and listen.

optout 5mo ago 💬 1

It makes me a bit disappointed, that it's still not possible to make a self hosted setup without 1 gig of disk.

Let's say you have an old seedphrase backup, and want to load it in a new setup to check the balance, in own bitcoin core node + electrum + sparrow stack.

Bitcoin core will download all the blocks!

With assumevalid, it will not _validate_ most of the old blocks, but it downloads them.

Pruned you cannot set until first you download everything.

Electrum does not work with pruned node.

So you need 1 gig of disk space and a few days to do this...

AFAIK there is no shortcut that does not rely on external server or some other trick (like copying blocks from another pruned node).

Relatively Irrelevant 4mo ago

Not quite right.

Let’s say you start with a 256 GB SSD drive.

Bitcoin Core and Knots will start with block 1 and download them all, but will begin pruning (discarding old blocks) when it begins running out of space.

You will download everything (to verify the chain of one block to another) but you will be a pruned node by the time it finishes.