The size of the full Bitcoin blockchain on September 19 exceeded 300 gigabytes. This is the size of the complete history of BTC transactions for almost 11 years of its existence.
According to Blockchain.com, full Bitcoin nodes now need over 300GB to download and save BTC transaction history to disks and synchronize with the Bitcoin network.
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While this amount of data may seem significant, a 1TB hard drive is sufficient to store the entire history of BTC transactions. At the same time, the archive node in the Ethereum blockchain already has a size of more than five terabytes and is growing at a record speed with an increase in block size, although the “simplified” node takes only 165 GB.
Over the past few years, the Bitcoin blockchain has grown faster than in the early years. This is largely due to the increase in daily transactions and the introduction of the SegWit scaling solution that effectively doubled the maximum block size.
In the first four years of its existence, the Bitcoin blockchain reached only 20 GB. Only in 2016, when it grew to 54 GB, its growth began to accelerate due to the increased number and activity of users. It is now growing at about 58 GB per year. Although the size of the blockchain does not affect network performance, as full nodes only need to download the entire transaction history once during synchronization, some aspects of it can be optimized.
One of the elements of the network is the unspent outputs (UTXOs), which are generated after each transaction. When a portion of the BTC is sent and the remainder is returned back to the wallet as “unspent”, another UTXO entry appears. According to one of the developers of Utreexo, Calvin Kim, although UTXOs currently occupy only four gigabytes of the total blockchain size, in the future they may become a problem for network scaling.
As a reminder, Thaddeus Dryja published a new research paper last summer outlining a proposed Utreexo Bitcoin scaling solution.
