Initial Block Download Bitcoin T-Shirt

Every node runner knows the wait: a new machine, a progress bar and a long evening of syncing. This shirt freezes that bar at 87 percent, a state many bitcoiners will recognize at a glance.

Initial block download, often shortened to IBD, is the term for what a new node does when it first starts: it fetches and verifies every block from the one after the genesis block up to the latest. A node that has been offline for a long time can do the same to catch up. Time varies a lot with hardware, from hours on a fast drive to days on a small board. The shirt keeps the bar at 87 percent.

Wear it to a meetup, a hackathon or the home office where a small server hums under the desk. If you are mid-sync yourself, it doubles as a status update. Everyone else gets the progress bar, and node runners get the sympathy.