The project
Overview
Cryptocurrency blockchains can grow in size quickly, especially
for privacy coins. The most popular privacy coin,
Monero , has a blockchain of almost 100GB. Syncing the full chain
from other users over unreliable networks can take days - if not
weeks.
At the
Scala cryptocurrency , we started seeing the same problem. Even though our chain
was only around 5GB at the time, we had far fewer users to sync
from. And so, the downloader was born.
Description
The blockchain downloader was a standalone tool available for
Windows, Mac, and Linux that shipped with the official
distribution of the Scala cryptocurrency. Users had the option
of using a torrent or direct download if torrents were blocked
within their networks.
Written in Go, it allowed a user to simply run a command, select
the preferred download method and wait for it to complete. It
took care of downloading the file, resuming broken downloads as
well as importing the data to get users online in a fraction of
the time.
During the time the downloader was shipped, it helped hundreds
of users get synced quickly and peaked at around 200GB in
transfers a month.
