Installed Ethereum Geth. Funded 0.25 ETH with bitcoins.
Never saw the 0.25 ETH coming into place, because as already happens with Bt-Core, it needs to synch with the network. But whereas Bitcoin can synch fast, Ethereum is taking forever. After 36 hours it completed merely 16% of synch, and I closed it by accident. When I restarted the program, it come back to 0%, that is, impossible to synch, since I will have to turn my computer off sometime. Solutions? Windows 7 here.
Be patient man, it always resets to 0% when you start, but you are closer (look at the number of blocks left).
Sometimes I only get one or two peers and it takes close to a week unfortunately. If you don't need the full chain, you can look up geth --fast and geth --light as other options or use infura
Two things:
(1) Once you start the sync, don't stop it. Geth takes a very long time to process some blocks. If you stop it halfway through, it will have to start over. In effect by stopping it and restarting it, you're doubling (or worse) the amount of time it takes to sync. Same is true of Parity. If you start geth with --verbosity 5 you will see that it's not hung and be more likely to wait it out.
(2) Try Parity. It syncs differently it seems to me. It quickly catches up to the head of the chain (by reading snapshots) and then, over time, syncs the full chain. In this way, while it is a bit less secure, it feels like it syncs more quickly.
