Faster way to sync my new Bitcoin wallet? I'm very new to Bitcoin so I apologize if this question is naive. I just downloaded the Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin Qt clients and opened each of these apps. Consistent with their coin's valuation, the Dogecoin client syncing was fastest, taking 3 hours, Litecoin took 20hrs, and Bitcoin is still trying to sync for 3 days now (progress bar shows only 25% synced).

I'm using a 2012 MacBook Pro (10.7.5) and have a good internet connection in a major city.  Some questions:


Is there a faster way to sync my Bitcoin wallet than what I described or is the Bitcoin Network just too popular now and one should expect a new wallet to take +10 days to establish?
To begin with, is putting your own wallet on your computer not advised?
The blockchain is available via Torrent now. You can download bootstrap.dat (14GB) this way and then process it locally, which in my case was much faster than syncing with network using Bitcoin-Qt.

Have a look at the announcement and you can grab torrent file from sourceforge.