@sjors by the way I went out and bought the exact hardware @evoskuil used for his Windows benchmark (PELADN HA-4, 1TB SSD / 32GB RAM), and I have performed the same benchmark using a slightly newer version of bn.exe .
The sync took 7605 seconds, which is about 127 minutes or 2.11 hours.
My sync was slower than @evoskuil’s because my internet connection is about 800Mbps vs Eric’s >2Gbps.
So libbitcoin does indeed seem to sync very quickly. I should probably do a bitcoin core sync on the same box to set the baseline.
For the record, the hardware cost US$530 for me because of import duties, but 2 hours on a US$530 machine is still an amazing result IMO.