j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckMS<div class="post">It does in fact download 500 blocks at a time, then the counter counts one at a time as it verifies the blocks.<br/><br/>The advantage of letting bitcoin download and verify the blocks is that you do not have to trust the person you're downloading them from. If you downloaded the blk*.dat files from some site, you would have to trust that site, since you would be accepting the data without verifying it yourself. If you're copying blk*.dat from another computer of yours, that should be fine.<br/><br/>How long is the initial block download taking for you?</div> text/html
https://whatsonchain.com/tx/bfb96fdae068f503ff1fc770ea035e87c073fb73079ff272b56cbe5a2f35a2dd