I have a question.
I saw that everyone need to get blocks before starting to get coins.
Does it mean that these blocks are the same for everyone?
Is there a database with all of them?
So … can I share this database with someone else to make him able to generate coins after few seconds?
I’m not sure if I have understood correctly how everything works
If I’m right … can we share an always updated database of blocks somewhere on the official website?

Although I’m not familiar with the specifics of the algorithm implementation in C++, I am familiar with how the verification works in general. Although the algorithm would have to be re-written, it really should be possible to verify blocks in both directions at the same time. Each block contains the hash of the previous block, but the first block contains a genesis hash, which isn’t the hash of a previous block. The first time bitcoins starts, it would treat a recent hash, perhaps a one day old hash as a temporary genesis hash and quickly verify the roughly 144 blocks up to the most recent block and it would continue to verify and optionally generate new hashes. Another thread would grab a previous hash, perhaps a two day old hash and treat it as the new temporary genesis hash. It would quickly verify the roughly 144 blocks, and verify that the last hash matches the previous genesis hash. The second thread would continue verifying previous blocks until it reached the real genesis block, which I believe is defined within Bitcoin itself. As you can see, blocks are always being verified in forward direction, but the beginning point is just pushed back until it reaches the real beginning. There could even be a third thread which would start at the real genesis hash and verify blocks from there so that they meet in the middle. All three of those threads could be grouped into another thread which would be run for each different chain of blocks which it is told about from other Bitcoin peers. If more than one chain is verified as authentic, Bitcoin would calculate and compare the total amount of computing power required to create the chain and keep only the strongest chain. Off the top of my head, an easy way to calculate the strongest chain, would be to find the largest sum of the inverses of the numeric value of each hash.

It does in fact download 500 blocks at a time, then the counter counts one at a time as it verifies the blocks.

The advantage of letting bitcoin download and verify the blocks is that you do not have to trust the person you’re downloading them from.  If you downloaded the blk*.dat files from some site, you would have to trust that site, since you would be accepting the data without verifying it yourself.  If you’re copying blk*.dat from another computer of yours, that should be fine.

How long is the initial block download taking for you?

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