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I.E. 9900 blocks remaining, 9904 blocks remaining and the total percent synced is decreasing. Is this normal behaviour? I'm on a mobile broadband connection but http connections are working just fine. It also says I have 8 active connections which I understand to be the maximum?

Thanks.

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    The number of blocks remaining is only an estimate, based on what other nodes say. There are maximum 8 outgoing connections, so if you can't receive any of your own, 8 is all you'll see, but that's plenty for synchronizing. Just wait somewhat longer.
    – Pieter Wuille
    Oct 24 '12 at 20:27
  • @PieterWuille Thanks. Just in case this helps anyone a quick reboot has remedied the issue and it is no progressing as one would expect.
    – satoshiisprettycool
    Oct 24 '12 at 20:37
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    Note that downloading the blockchain will greatly speed up the syncronisation process: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/799/…
    – Highly Irregular
    Oct 24 '12 at 22:36
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Looks like you were just unlucky in choosing your peers.

When connecting to a peer your client and the peer exchange a handshake message. Part of this handshake message is the height of the longest chain the peer has locally stored. Your client will then starting to download blocks until it catches up to the top of the longest chain. If the peers you connect to happen to be also catching up with the chain you will only see the length of their chains and will be unaware about the real length of the longest chain in the entire network.

Nothing to worry about, you will eventually have an accurate estimate of the real length: as soon as you connect to a peer with the longest chain, or one of your peers has caught up to the longest chain, your client will update its estimate.

Reconnecting also works as new peers are chosen. When you wrote your question, on October 24th, the longest chain was 204'663 blocks long, so the ~10'000 blocks or so were quite a long way off. Hopefully by now you caught up to the head of the Blockchain.

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