blocks directory size too big and txindex

[giacecco]

Hi All, I'm running the 0.11.2 Bitcoin core distribution on MacOS, compiled from source.

For a while I had txindex=1 in the configuration file to learn more about the protocol and stuff. Yesterday I removed that, deleted the _blocks_ directory and restarted the daemon with -reindex, expecting _blocks_ to be recreated to be much smaller than the previous >60 Gb, thanks to ignoring all parts of the blockchains that aren't relevant to my wallet. This morning the process has finished and it still is >60 Gb! Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

G.

[shorena]

Hi All, I'm running the 0.11.2 Bitcoin core distribution on MacOS, compiled from source.

For a while I had txindex=1 in the configuration file to learn more about the protocol and stuff. Yesterday I removed that, deleted the _blocks_ directory and restarted the daemon with -reindex, expecting _blocks_ to be recreated to be much smaller than the previous >60 Gb, thanks to ignoring all parts of the blockchains that aren't relevant to my wallet. This morning the process has finished and it still is >60 Gb! Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

G.

No, currently the blockchain is that big. txindex=1 will increase the size of the database your wallet keeps track of, not the size of the blocks the data in said database is based on.

If you dont run a wallet you can reduce the size with prune=. If you use the node as a wallet you have to wait for 0.12 to run a pruned wallet.

[giacecco]

Understood, wow, that's quite demanding, particularly for people running wallets on mobile devices. How do applications like Breadwallet manage to deal with all this data on an iPhone, for example?

[shorena]

Understood, wow, that's quite demanding, particularly for people running wallets on mobile devices. How do applications like Breadwallet manage to deal with all this data on an iPhone, for example?

They dont, breadwallet is not a full node. Most wallets are not, they rely on others running full nodes to get the data they need. I dont know exactly how breadwallet works, but common ways are either special servers (e.g. Electrum) that run a full node or directly query full nodes for data (e.g. multibit).