1
According to section 7 of the original bitcoin spec. by Satoshi:
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space.
In order to get the bitcoin-qt client running, I am currently downloading the ENTIRE block chain from the https://bitcoin.org/bin/blockchain/bootstrap.dat.torrent
Is there a smaller download somewhere? My google skills are failing me, plz help.
2You could use a thin-client like MultiBit which doesn't require the entire blockchain to be downloaded. – Luca Matteis – 2014-05-03T17:18:02.527
Hi, welcome to the site. Have a look at the question Nate points to, according to the answers given therein the download size would not be reduced, only the storage. – Joe Pineda – 2014-05-03T20:42:20.800