I had a go at downloading the Bitcoin blockchain from scratch this weekend. A new Ubuntu 16.04 installation on an old Packard Bell laptop (dual 1.6 GHz processor, 500 Gb hard disk, 4Gb RAM), a clean Bitcoin Core installation, and fired it up, with a 24 Mbps network connection.

46 hours later the full blockchain had been downloaded and verified. 136 Gb of data in total, recording over a quarter of a billion transactions.

This seems like a reasonable level of performance to me.

What I learned:
[1] Disk access is probably the limiting factor for your Bitcoin blockchain usage. When I was using a USB stick (256Gb Kingston Savage, USB 3.0) it kept falling over.
[2] When I briefly lost the internet connection, Bitcoin Core hung, and I had to kill it and restart.

I’ll try Ethereum later in the week.