More than a decade ago, on January 3, 2009, the bitcoin blockchain was 0.285 kilobytes (kB), or about 285 bytes. Today, however, the blockchain ledger has reached almost half a terabyte, or roughly 432 gigabytes.
The size of the Bitcoin blockchain approaches 500 gigabytes
On October 15, 2022, the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain is about to reach 500 gigabytes, or roughly half a terabyte, in order to store the entire distributed ledger history on the drive. At the time of this writing, it is not possible to store the entireblockchain in BTCIt would take more than 432,000 megabytes (MB) or 432 gigabytes (GB) to store the entire blockchain.
Nearly 14 years ago, on January 3, 2009, the day Satoshi Nakamoto launched the network, the blockchain was less than a kilobyte in size, about 285 bytes. The size of Bitcoin’s distributed ledger exceeded 1 MB on February 16, 2009, and on February 13, 2012, the blockchain size was about 1 million kB or 1 GB.
26} andthe current 432 GB is, the BTC chain is, and the BTC chain size is approximately 432,176,009 kB on Saturday. Miners and full nodes need to store the entire blockchain network, meaning they need more than 432 GB to manage the entire chain.
At the time of writing, there are 14,299 reachable full nodes according to today’s metrics, which means that thousands of nodes host full copies of the blockchain network. Wallets that do not manage full nodes are called light clients and utilize a simplified payment verification (SPV) scheme.
SPV clients synchronize with a nearby valid bitcoin full node, rather than hosting a full node. Most wallets used in the crypto community today are SPV wallets, and full nodes are used by full node operators, miners, and institutions such as exchanges, settlement companies, and custodians.
BTCis not the only distributed ledger that requires a lot of disk space for storage. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is 186 GB, Bitcoin v (BSV) is over 7 terabytes (TB), and the Dash (DASH) network is around 27 GB. 495 GB of Ethereum (ETH) is 5 gigabytes away from reaching 0.5 TB.
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