Yep, downloading the blockchain (block_log) and replaying it, might be faster. But that involved "believing" in what others are providing to you. And I love the old way of setting things... ALL by myself! So patiently sync up from the beginning to verify all is working as expected.

Either way, I don't think we have snapshotting available on the current code... which would accelerate deployments in some sense... otherwise, you need to also take the same shared_memory.bin file from when the block_log finished.

I can try to provide block_log and shared_memory.bin files in the future, for others to bring nodes faster. But that's not the right way of doing things. It might be a good emergency way to get the blockchain running again, but not a very way of decentralizing effort.