Ethereum: How to know if bitcoind synced?

Understanding Bitcoind and its Filesystem

As a Bitcoin user, it’s important to understand how Bitcoin software works, including Bitcoind. In this article, we’ll explore how to tell if Bitcoind has synced with the network.

The Basics of Bitcoind

When you install Bitcoind on your Ubuntu system, it creates a new directory structure that reflects its configuration and data files. Here’s an overview of the filesystem layout:

• ./database: The Bitcoin database, which stores information about blocks, transactions, and other relevant data.

• ./blocks/index: A database of all blocks on the Bitcoin network, with timestamps and transaction counts.

• Other subdirectories: These contain various files specific to each block or transaction.

Synchronize with the network

To confirm if Bitcoind has synced with the Bitcoin network, you can check the following files:

• ./database directory:

• If the file size is around 16 KB (16,000 bytes) and not too large, it probably hasn’t synced yet.

• ./blocks/index directory:

• The timestamp of the last block in this directory should be close to the current time.

• Other subdirectories:

• If you have files with names like 0001.txt, 0002.txt or similar, this indicates that they haven’t synced yet.

The “du -h” command

The du command is used to estimate the disk space consumption of a directory. If you run du -h ./database, you will see the following:

• The first line shows the size of each file in the directory, with the unit (K, M, etc.) and the number of directories (/) on the left.

• The next lines show the estimated total size of the files and subdirectories.

Example:

16K ./database
59M ./blocks/index
29G ./blocks
646M ...

In this case, the first line indicates that the ./database directory contains approximately 16 KB (1.6 MB) of data.

Conclusion

To confirm if Bitcoind has synced with the Bitcoin network, check the size of the ./database and ./blocks/index directories. If they are not too large, the block sync process is probably still in progress. However, as a general rule, these directories should be around 1-10MB in size after 10 hours, depending on network conditions.

Additional Tips

• You can check the current time by running date or using a tool like time.

• If you are concerned that the sync process is taking too long, consider increasing the amount of disk space available to bitcoind (-d ).

• Check your file system regularly for changes that might indicate sync problems.