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Author Topic: What prevents the blockchain from becoming impossibly large?  (Read 2554 times)
taltamir (OP)
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February 21, 2013, 06:58:47 PM
 #21

It depends on if you denominate "large" in bytes or dollar cost. If the former, then nothing; the blockchain will inexorably become impossibly large (which is good!). If the latter, then the exponentially decreasing price of storage costs will counter blockchain growth.

That assumes an infinite moores law.
This faces 2 issues:
1. Physics, you just can't continue shrinking infinitely and the cost of shrinking are growing exponentially driving competition out of the market.
2. Market, SSDs have shifted focus to speed over size while being very expensive; companies are leaving the HDD market as well as consolidating. Fewer players means higher costs.
World
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February 21, 2013, 07:04:25 PM
 #22

2013-02-20 - my bitcoin data folder is 13.4GB (6GB for "blocks" subfolder + 172MB chainstate subfolder + 7.07GB for blkindex.dat and blk0001.dat through blk0003.dat)

Windows is lying to you. The block files in blocks\ and its parent directory are hardlinked and should only be counted once. You can delete blk0001.dat through blk0003.dat and blkindex.dat.

On GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) my .bitcoin folder size is 7.7 GB. Anything more is just Microsoft Windows bloat that can be addressed by defenestrating (replacing Windows with GNU/Linux on) the computer in question.
what extra data can i clear on Mac OSX?thx

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taltamir (OP)
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February 21, 2013, 07:08:10 PM
 #23

@World: I suspect that its the same as windows and there is nothing extra to clear.
Deleting the files that are "safe" to delete on windows just cleared out some symlinks that caused mis-reporting of the directory's size and had no effect on the actual amount of free space on the drive.
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