The size of the Bitcoin blockchain has exceeded 300 GB. At this time, the historical data size of complete Bitcoin transactions in the past 10 years, while the data size of Ethereum has exceeded 5 TB, and the size of each node has reached 165GB.
View
Data from Blockchain.com shows that the size of the entire Bitcoin blockchain has exceeded 300 GB. This is the data size of the complete Bitcoin transaction history in the past 10 years. This is also the amount of information that all mining nodes need to download and save on the hard disk after synchronizing with the Bitcoin network. In contrast, the full node data size of the Ethereum blockchain has exceeded 5 TB, and it continues to grow at a high speed as the block size increases, although the reduced node is only 165 GB.
According to Blockchain.com, the size of the complete Bitcoin blockchain on September 19 exceeded 300 GB of data.
This is the size of the complete Bitcoin transaction history in the past ten years. This is also the amount of information that a full mining node needs to download and keep on its hard disk after synchronizing with the Bitcoin network.
Despite the seemingly huge amount of data, a terabyte hard drive can easily cover it-and continue to do so for the next year or two. In contrast, the size of the archive node on the Ethereum blockchain has exceeded 5 TB, and it has increased at a record rate as the block size increases, even though the pruned node is only 165GB.
However, compared to the early days, the Bitcoin blockchain has been growing at a faster rate in the past few years. This is mainly due to the increase in the number of transactions performed every day and the introduction of the scalable solution SegWit, which effectively doubled the block size to two megabytes.
In the first four years of its life, the Bitcoin blockchain has just reached 20GB. It wasn’t until 2016, when it reached 54GB, that its growth began to accelerate-probably due to an increase in the number of people using the network. Now, it is growing at a rate of about 58GB per year.
Although the size of the Bitcoin blockchain today does not necessarily affect the speed of the network-after all, the entire node only needs to download the entire content once during synchronization, but some parts of it can still be optimized.
Enable blockchain to scale
A small aspect of Bitcoin inflation is the unused transaction output (UTXO), which is created when some Bitcoin is sent and the rest of the wallet is sent back to the wallet as “unused.” According to Utreexo developer Calvin Kim, although they only occupy 4 GB of space now, they may become a scalability bottleneck in the future.
This is the problem Utreexo is trying to solve. Utreexo compresses these proofs to less than 1 KB and provides long-term scalability solutions as they grow.
“Utreexo is a hash-based accumulator that can compress unused output to a smaller size. There is no security loss; instead, the burden of tracking funds has been transferred to the owners of these funds.
The project has already received some support. The 100x Group, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, recently awarded Utreexo a one-year grant of $40,000. However, changing Bitcoin is a slow and laborious process (intentionally), so it may take a while to implement. But with the slow growth of Bitcoin, there is enough time to adapt.
