I installed Zcash4mac 6 days ago, and the blockchain sync is STILL only 60% complete. Is there a torrent of the blockchain somewhere?
This sort of thing makes z-addresses basically unusuable… people are supposed to install software that takes a week+ to sync before they can use the core features of Zcash?
Hey, welcome to the community! I recently had the same experience and did a bit of digging to find an answer.
At this stage 60%-synced coincides more-or-less with a period of extremely high transaction counts per block, you can see them on this graph as peaks starting around block 106600:
https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/timeseries?hashrate=false&supply=false
Apparently these high numbers of transactions were caused by an exchange or miner sweeping wallets into a single account. This happened around 1 May, and caused some uproar amongst miners back then.
Your client is downloading the blocks mined during that time and is most probably taking some time to verify the transactions/blocks.
Hang in there, once you reach about 6 May you should see it going faster again. I agree that this is not a great first-time user experience. Hopefully there’s a plan to improve the slow initial sync.
how about now? anyone care the share the blockchain?