On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 04:22:13PM +0000, Robert Williamson wrote:
> >
> > The issue is mostly visible when downloading the blockchain from
> > block 1, since there's a lot of very small blocks, and all peers
> > have them.
>
> This is why I think we need a special use case, connect to some nodes
> and if a good proportion of them are further than ~ 1000 blocks ahead,
> enter an initial download mode, where you only connect to a few nodes
> at once, send a getblocks, wait until they are all received, push
> them into the block writer and then send another request, until it is
> caught up.

Sounds just about right.