More Examples
“The initial block download took a few hours once I joined the bitcoin network.”
“‘IBD stands for ‘Initial Block Download.'”
“My bitcoin node has finished its initial block download.”
Definition(s) from the Web
- Bitcoin Core downloads the blockchain when your node first joins the network. Source
- Once a new node joins the network, its first order of business is to download and validate the entire blockchain. This is an integral step to the distributed nature of bitcoin because only by doing this can a node claim that it has independently validated all transactions. As the blockchain grows in size, the time required for IBD increases unless optimizations are made to the code. Various optimizations have been made since Satoshi’s original client was released, but as of 2014, with increasing transaction volume, initial download on laptop hardware with an average connection could still take up to 24 hours. Developers agreed that this was unacceptable and a new approach was developed called “headers first” mode. This approach resulted in a substantial speedup. Source
