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commenting to come back to this so i can research it more when i have time. im new and want to know the purpose of purchasing a device that has the first 900k blocks already downloaded and verified. what is the benefit?
it seems to me that the question is similar to what is the purpose of purchasing a device with the software preloaded onto it -- in both cases, it's handy to have someone else do something fiddly. Installing your own operating system is only a little more technically involved than installing bitcoin core and downloading and verifying the whole chain. And waiting for the initial block download to complete is kinda a pain in the ass. The only reason people do it is so they don't have to trust someone else -- but if you've already trusted them to install the OS on your computer, why wouldn't you also trust them to give you a copy of the chain?
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