Benefits and Risks of Bootstraping the Database
When Sia is synchronizing, it's downloading the entire history of all the transactions and blocks on the Sia network piece by piece since the beginning, and verifying each piece along the way. This process is resource intensive, especially on traditional hard drives, and can take hours or even days to complete.
Downloading a consensus database file (also known as bootstrapping) makes your Sia client synchronize significantly faster. Because our database is updated daily, your client will only have to synchronize what's new over the last few hours. This can cut hours or days off your synchronization time. Because the database is also zipped and compressed, the file is smaller than normal to download, so you'll download it a little faster.
However, the risk to downloading a consensus database from any source is that you're accepting the transaction history of the Sia network as provided by that source. By downloading SiaSetup's consensus, you're trusting that we haven't made changes to the transaction history in the database file in order to take advantage of your Sia client somehow. This risk is fairly negligible - we would have to know which Sia node was yours, and then somehow interact with you by trying to get you to accept something like a transaction which we didn't have funds to cover or a bogus renting/hosting contract. On top of that, other clients would reject your node because it's consensus wouldn't agree with the rest of the network.
We can't give you much more than our word and the word of the general Sia community as to our reputation and the fact that our consensus database hasn't been tampered with (it hasn't). However, if for any reason you're concerned that our consensus database isn't trustworthy, simply don't download it, and synchronize your Sia client from scratch the way it's designed to be used. Synchronizing from the beginning is the most secure way to use Sia, and to know that you have an accurate history of network transactions that hasn't been tampered with - it's just a very slow process.
Download Consensus Zip
Download: http://direct.consensus.siahub.info/consensus.db.gz
Installation Instructions
Download and install Sia if you haven't yet. You can find Sia downloads here: https://sia.tech/get-started/.
Open the Sia-UI or siad and let it start synchronizing if you haven't yet.
Click on About > Show Sia Data, or see this FAQ topic and navigate to the location of Sia's internal data files. Keep this folder open.
Close Sia completely - you may need to right-click the Sia icon by the system tray and select Quit Sia.
Download the consensus zip file above.
Extract consensus.db from the consensus zip file you downloaded above and place it in \sia\consensus\ - the consensus folder is found in the one that you opened earlier. Replace the existing consensus.db file with the one from the zip.
Open Sia and let it synchronize to 100%. Syncronization should already be nearly complete when you open Sia.
When opening Sia after installing the downloaded consensus database, you may see a message that loading takes a while after upgrading. This message may display for several hours, especially if you've just downloaded and opened Sia for the first time. While the consensus database provided here is nearly up to date, Sia still has to go through and build other things from the database, which can take some time. As long as the update message is displayed and no other error message is seen, Sia is working as intended and you simply need to wait and let it finish what it's doing.