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Zcoin – Setting up the wallet to sync quickly with screenshots

The cryptocurrency craze is in full swing yet again, and zcoins are one of the key new currencies to emerge after the blistering succcess of bitcoin.

The status and mainstream use of digital coins has changed dramatically, and become a new asset class of late.

I’m curious, so have jumped on board to investigate what its all about.

Below is a graphic tutorial about how to set up your zcoin wallet quickly and easily, without having to wait forever for it to sync.

Downloading and syncing a bitcoin wallet, which is gigabytes in size seemed too arduous and time consuming for an impatient guy with only a cursory interest in the subject, so I chose Zcoin.

https://zcoin.io/get-zcoin/

You can download the wallet program for your OS of choice at the address above.

The catch is that it seems to take aeons to sync the wallet, by downloading the blockchain and processing it.

Apparently the start up process for your wallet can take days to weeks, through the size of the blockchain itself is only quite small, at around 187Mb! (at time of writing)

zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain

zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_slownessInternet speed seems to have precious little to do with it; its just mind numbingly SLOW!

A couple hours after installation, less than 7% of the estimated transactions int he chain have been downloaded and processed.

 

I thought I’d be clever, avoid the pain, and download the entire blockchain file in its entirety off Znode.

http://znode.io/

The whole download took just a few minutes at 1MB/Sec.Znode_zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_very_fast_download

Next step is to extract the zip file, and put the files in their requisite places for the zcoin wallet to pick up.

The unzipping of the Zcoin block chain file from Znode is a very quick operation, taking less than a couple minutes.

Znode_zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_unzipping_time

As promised, the zip folder contained the “blocks” and “chainstate” folders, which need to be dumped into the USER\Appdata\Roaming\zcoin folder on windows operating systems

Znode_zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_zipfolder_contents_blocks_chainstate

A bit of copy pasting later, and I have imported the downloaded full blockchain files into the zcoin wallet to give it a head start.

I took the cautious approach, and just changed the names of the current folders with their 7% progress with a BAK suffix, so I can restore and go back to doing the sync the long way if the process doesn’t work.

Znode_zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_importing_blockchain_file_into_zcoin_wallet

Just for interest, at present, the zcoin blocks folder is 243MB on disk, and the chainstate folder is a teeny 11MB. Of course, as time goes on, this will blow out to huge sizes, as the coin is in its relative infancy.

Now, to see how long the processing and sync takes once this little boost has been added…

Znode_zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_imported_wallet_loadingAll looks healthy here… it just may take a little while.

Looking at the stats on the system performance, depicted below; the CPU is banging away at a modest 21% load from loading the wallet.

It may be hanging, but we will see what comes from this in a few hours.

 

Znode_zcoin_QT_wallet_sync_blockchain_imported_wallet_loading_CPU_RAM_USAGE

The situation looks fairly positive though, as the wallet.DAT file is being constantly written to during this process.

Posts on the zcoin website indicate that the reason it takes so long is verification of no double spends.

https://zcoin.io/new-zcoin-release-v0-1-8-wallet-loading-optimised-and-mac-os-compile-issues-fixed/

I’ve taken note of the time the verification began, and will update this post once I have a definitive loading time.  A progress bar certainly would have been nice on the opening screen.

UPDATE! looks like it took about 5 hours to load the saved part of the blockchain…  only thing, its now 8 hours behind, so will take quite a while to sync up again. (More hours!!)

2017-06-30 14:40:12 init message: Loading wallet..
2017-06-30 20:07:49 PROCESS BLOCK = 41049

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