A decade ago, Bitcoin’s blockchain size was 0.2285 kilobytes, or approximately 285 bytes. Today, however, the blockchain’s ledger is nearly half a terabyte, or roughly 432 gigabytes.
Bitcoin’s Blockchain Nears 500 Gigabytes in Size
On October 15, 2022, the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain is getting closer to reaching 500 gigabytes, or roughly half a terabyte of space, in order to store the entire distributed ledger’s history on a drive. The total storage of the BTC blockchain takes more than 432,000 megabytes or 432 gigabytes of space.
Nearly 14 years ago, on January 3, 2009 the blockchain had a size of less than 1 MB or 285 bytes. This was the date Satoshi Nakamoto created the network. It wasn’t until February 16, 2009 that Bitcoin’s distributed ledger surpassed 1 MB in size and by February 13, 2012, the blockchain was approximately 1,000,000 kB or 1 GB in size.
The BTC blockchain is 432GB in size today. On Saturday, it was approximately 432176,009kB. Full nodes and miners are needed to store all of the blockchain network. This means that they require more space than 432GB to handle the whole chain.
At the time of writing, there are 14,299 reachable full nodes according to today’s metrics, which means thousands of nodes host a full copy of the blockchain network. Wallets that don’t manage a full node are called light clients, and they utilize a simplified payment verification (SPV) scheme.
SPV clients don’t host full nodes, but instead sync with other validating Bitcoin full nodes. Today, most wallets are made up of SPV wallets. However, full nodes are only used by full-node operators, miners, institutions, exchanges, payments companies, custodians, and other full nodes.
BTC isn’t the only distributed ledger that requires a large amount of storage space. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoinsv(BSV), and Dash/DASH (DASH) networks are all around 27 GB. Ethereum (ETH), at 495 GB is just five gigabytes from reaching 0.5 TB.
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