Bitcoin Forum

Hi,
My question might have been answered before because it is very basic.
As far as i understood the concept of Bitcoin,all transactions ever done are stored in one single blockchain.

How does bitcoin prevent a rapidly growing blockchain? The more people use bitcoin, the faster it will grow. So it will grow exponentially until it is too big to handle.
I can't imagine, that there is such a basic problem.

Regards
Chricken

You can't prevent the number of increasing unless you stop transactions which you can't do either . Check here for the volume growth of the blockchain file (as you can see from 20gb to 40gb in about one year) : https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

However this may not be a problem for most users who are running nodes because who want to run nodes have most likely the needed internet speed and the needed space available on their Hard drive and some run on Windows VPS to help the network . for what comes to the other users well they have the choice to choose Lightweight wallet such as Electrum and Multibit .

It is growing but that is not a big problem.

Pruning allows a node to free up storage space by removing transactions that are no longer needed to verify that the blockchain is in a consistent state (i.e. no bitcoins were created improperly).

Estimates of needing to store only 1.3 gb of data versus the 30gb we are approaching reduces the cost required at least for mobile storage by about $10+. Now 16gb looks spacious next to a full node on 32 or 64gb.

As for growth, storage requirements for a pruned node scale more closely with how bitcoins are distributed in the unspent transaction set (aka utxo). This means storage will grow O(the number of users) rather than with O(the number of transactions).

At these levels it starts to be practical for a phone or tablet to run a pruned node. This is useful for those that want a greater level of trust with their mobile wallets as well as those who wish to help Bitcoin nodes with bandwidth and connectivity challenges to keep up to date.

This development should help Bitcoin to extend its network reach and improve the trust level possible on commodity phones, tablets, and network equipment be that mobile or otherwise.

Thank you for your answers,

so, did I understand you right, that there are two different ways to store the blockchain (bc)?
- The complete bc with at about 40GB of size. Which is going to grow massively, when more and more people use the network.
- The reduced bc, which only stores 'important' nodes and is 1.5GB of size and not going to grow as fast as the complete bc.
Is that right so far?
But in my eyes, 1.5GB (how big will it be in 5 or 10 years) is still a big number on some devices.
Are there ideas to face that problem?
I don't feel,  that hoping for growing bandwidth and storagesizes are the best way.

Regards
Chricken

As far as I know blockchain pruning is still a proposal rather than a fact. It seems that a pruned version might amount to the last 550 blocks, so that's 550 mb.

This topic has been discussed various times here on the board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89713.20
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=913605.0

Since the beginning of Bitcoin every transaction is written in file which weights (as of now) 46GB. It that too much? Considering price for 1GB of today's hard drives I don't think so.
Additionally you are in need of downloading blockchain only if you want to use full validation wallet which requires blockchain locally. So this is not problem at all imo.