I thought about the problem, that first time syncs takes a very long time and new users become impatient waiting for the sync to complete.

Besides other possible solutions there is one option to install the block chain related data to a system as part of the installation process for pre-compiled packages for linux and windows.

The advantage is, that the data could be downloaded in a compressed format. The compression factor will be very low, as most of the data is hashed and can't be compressed.

The current blockchain is about 600 MB compressed as zip. On a 1 Mbit line it should take about 80 minutes to download this.

My suggestion is to store the blockchain under /var/opt/feathercoin/..... for Linux and under %appdata%\feathercoin for windows.

At start the client should perform following tasks:

check if blocks directory is available under ~user/.feathercoin/blocks (linux)
%userdata% \??? (windows)
if no to 1.
- check if blockchain data is available under /var/opt/feathercoin (%appdata%)
- if yes
  - link /var/opt/feathercoin/blocks to ~user/.feathercoin/blocks (linux)
  - link %appdata%\feathercoin\blocks to %userdata%\feathercoin\blocks
- if no
  - download blockchain and store as done today

Commments?