Sync – Skip IBD on cleaned nodes?
There is an option to perform a fast synchronization by downloading a snapshot of the datadir from the synced cleaned node.
This includes stronger trust assumptions than those proposed. assumeutxo (also assumevalid) you are giving full control to your datadir. This could potentially open the node to certain types of attacks. For example, you may encounter a buffer overflow that affects reading a block from disk, but not when reading from a peer-to-peer network. Alternatively, it may provide nodes with inconsistent database states that lead to unexpected extreme situations.
I know of two distributors that publish cleaned datadir snapshots.
- prunednode.today managed by Specter wallet developers and integrated into Specter
- BTCPay’s fastsync has also been integrated into BTCPay as an option. Instructions for downloading snapshots can be found here.
However, both are for mainnet. I’m not aware of testnet snapshots being available anywhere.
If you already have a synced node and want to set up a new node on a new machine, using a snapshot can also be a good option.
I’ve integrated prunednode.today as a quick way to set up pruned nodes (+block explorer, Electrum server, etc.) in a project I’m working on. You can get everything up and running with this one line:
docker run -it --rm --name ez -v ~/eznode:/data eznode/eznode TRUSTED_FASTSYNC=1
More information can be found at https://ezno.de/packages#fast-sync.
