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Well over a decade ago, on January 3, 2009, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain was 0.285 kilobytes (kB) or about 285 bytes. Today, however, the blockchain’s ledger is almost half a terabyte, or roughly 432 gigabytes.
On October 15, 2022, Blockchain Bitcoin (BTC) is approaching 500 gigabytes, or about half a terabyte of space, to store the entire history of the distributed ledger on one drive. At the time of writing, storing the entire BTC blockchain requires more than 432,000 megabytes (MB) or 432 gigabytes (GB) of space.
Close to 14 years ago, on January 3, 2009, the blockchain was less than a kilobyte in size or about 285 bytes, the day Satoshi Nakamoto launched the network. It was not until February 16, 2009 that Bitcoin’s distributed ledger exceeded 1 MB in size, and by February 13, 2012, the blockchain was approximately 1,000,000 kB or 1 GB in size.
At 432 GB today, the BTC chain is approximately 432,176,009 kB in size on Saturday. Miners and full nodes are required to store the entire blockchain network, which means they need more than 432 GB of space to manage the entire chain.
At the time of writing, there are 14,299 available full nodes according to today’s calculations, which means thousands of nodes are hosting a full copy of the blockchain network. Wallets that do not manage a full node are called light clients, and they use a simplified payment verification (SPV) scheme.
SPV clients do not host a full node, but rather synchronize with nearby validating bitcoin full nodes. Most of the wallets used by the crypto community today are SPV wallets, while full nodes are used by full node operators, miners and institutions such as exchanges, payment companies and custodians.
BTC is not the only distributed ledger that takes a lot of disk space to store. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is 186 GB, Bitcoinsv (BSV) is over 7 terabytes (TB), and the Dash network (DASH) is around 27 GB. At 495 GB, Ethereum (ETH) is just five gigabytes away from reaching 0.5 TB.
What do you think about the size of the Bitcoin blockchain and its steady growth since 2009? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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