Bootstrap.dat is just a recent chain-state backup.
Discussion
Well thats good to know.... now lol 😂 as im already half way through syncing for a seccond time. Full syncing is just a "you 100 percent know you got the unaltered version"? I read the white paper briefly and i ask could just bootstraping lead to discrepancys later? Lets say if a bitcoin that had not been used (so syncing new blocks would work ) was tampered with then one day in the future that gets used and that leads to a error in the block chain. Then I mention that if your not the only person to have used that excat file to set up your node leed to a "bad" transaction turning good ? Sorry if my lack of knowledge makes that hard to understand.
In general that's not really possible. If you had a corrupted bootstrap file (a different chain-state from the actual one) it would fail. Best thing would be to ask a friend to bootstrap their sycned wallet. I think Bitcoin.org used to maintain one as well but afaik they stopped. At one point there was an update for better syncing and everyone stopped doing bootstrap files. Fun fact, a recent bootstrap is still much faster than a sync from scratch.
Just in case your curious where I came up with my question lol this is where. Thank you for explaining bootstraping. I think I remember something of the sort being suggested when trying to move your node to a new device. 