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I'm looking to download the full pruned blockchain for Monero instead of syncing it and then pruning it. Where can I find this pruned monero blockchain file?

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  • My wallet doesn't connect to a node. How can I exactly do this: To wrap up, if you wish to run a pruned node, start the daemon with --prune-blockchain I'm totally new to this. I use linux, ubuntu.
    – Anneke van der Wal
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 19:07

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Simply explained from jtgrassie's answer, you download the blockchain first, then prune it.

This is now done automatically. When you run a node, it will be pruned and you don't have to do anything else.

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    A node is not automatically pruned. The default is unpruned.
    – jtgrassie
    Commented May 15, 2020 at 13:27
  • If this answer is incorrect it should be downvoted. However, I'm not absolutely positive that it's incorrect.
    – Nicholas Saunders
    Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 2:59
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It helps to better understand first how pruning works.

When pruning, your blockchain gets split into stripes. These start from a random point chosen when you first decide to prune. If you are pruning, only your pruning stripes get pruned (non-essential data gets removed after validation). The non-pruning stripes will have full data. So every node that prunes, their stripes of unpruned data will be different to other pruned nodes, based on the random starting point mentioned earlier. Your pruned node still participates on the network sharing blocks to other nodes that need to sync - but you are obviously only able to share blocks that you have not pruned.

Armed with this information, you can see it would be extremely harmful to the network if every node had the exact same stripes of pruned/unpruned data. This is why it makes no sense to have a pruned blockchain file available for downloading.

Also, when you run a node, you want your node to have fully validated every block. A pruned node still does this - it only prunes data for blocks that fall into a pruned stripe after it has validated it. This is another reason why you wouldn't want to download a pruned blockchain file - you'd have no way to validate it.

I'll also add, the full blockchain.raw download file is pretty much redundant nowadays anyway. The syncing speed of the blockchain directly from the daemon, on the network, has been greatly improved over the years.

To wrap up, if you wish to run a pruned node, start the daemon with --prune-blockchain. It will download and validate every block from the network but not save everything to disk. It will continue to participate on the network in sharing blocks it has not pruned to other nodes.

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  • ok so i should just store my own pruned monero node and not copy someone else's?
    – Patoshi パトシ ♦
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 16:22
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    Correct. You have your own pruned blockchain, not copying someone else's.
    – jtgrassie
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 20:16
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    This is a great answer. But how does a new block get validated by a pruned node if it could contain tx that depend on the pruned data? Or is it by design that for data to be prunable, it is guaranteed to never be able to affect a future tx?
    – NReilingh
    Commented Apr 17, 2021 at 4:07
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    @NReilingh a "new block" is not yet pruned by your local node, hence your node validates and then prunes prune-able data from blocks it's going to prune. The new (unpruned) block and your local non-pruned data has everything needed to validate. Also see this answer; the only data that's discarded is data not needed again after verifying.
    – jtgrassie
    Commented Apr 17, 2021 at 8:21

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