What's up with https://getbitcoinblockchain.com/ ?

I'm trying to sync the blockchain on a really old laptop with Debian and Raspiblitz, and it's painfully slow. I used to know about this site where you could grab the whole blockchain through a torrent. What happened to that? Is there any similar option out there? Appreciate any help!

I have FTTH (300 mbps), it would take like 5 hours at full speed (the blockchain is like 550 GB now).

Download Bitcoin Core wallet and sync it with the blockchain. https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/ Verify it before using too. Downloading anything exclusively the blockchain from Torrent is risky, you are in danger. If you don't want to download a full Bitcoin blockchain because you don't need to run a full node, use Electrum wallet. How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum

There exist torrents out there which you can find if you look for them. I'm not going to link them directly since I would not trust them, however. The slowest part of the process is not the downloading, but the validation. If you perform the IBD through Core, it will validate as it goes. If you torrent the blockchain, then Core cannot start validation until your torrent is complete, and you will likely have to wait the same amount of time for the validation anyway. Given this, then I would be suspicious that any torrent of the blockchain would contain something malicious hidden inside since there is no real reason to have a torrent of the blockchain in the first place.

What are the specifications of the rest of your system. SSD will be faster then spinning drive. Doing it on a 2nd gen i3 will be orders of magnitude slower then even a 6th gen i7 How much ram? And so on, download speed is only 1 piece of the puzzle. If your PC can't keep up then the download speed does not matter. -Dave

My system is a Toshiba laptop from 2009, not a beefy one as you can imagine: CPU: 2 GHz RAM: 4 GB HDD I have now switched the HDD to an HP Elite 8300 SFF and it seems to be working better: CPU: 3,4 GHz (boost up to 3,9 GHz I think) RAM: 16 GB HDD (same as before)

You might want to increase the dbcache settings in your conf file for the IBD since you have the extra RAM now. Will speed it up a bunch. Since you have 16GB if you are doing nothing else with the machine then you can easily get away with 8GB cache [ dbcache=8000 ] After the initial download and sync you can comment that line out. -Dave

It will work, but will always be slow. Unless there's a reason you don't want Electrum, I wouldn't use Bitcoin Core on this hardware. Do yourself a favor: get an SSD It's the best upgrade you can get. In case you already have an SSD and just use the HDD for block storage: move your chainstate directory to the SSD. It makes all the difference!