Fast synchronization
At the time of writing this book, the blockchain size is around 30 GB. Downloading it may take several hours or days if you have a slow Internet connection. Ethereum implements a fast synchronization algorithm, which can download the blockchain faster.
Fast synchronization doesn't download the entire blocks; instead, it only downloads the block headers, transactions receipts, and the recent state database. So, we don't have to download and replay all transactions. To check blockchain integrity, the algorithm downloads a full block after every defined number of blocks. To learn more about fast synchronization algorithm, visit https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/1889.
To use fast sync while downloading the blockchain, ...
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