Why are blocks so big?

[doobadoo]

I decided to take a look into this whole "block chain is getting too big" madness.  Here is a recently generated block:
https://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000007296b28cec4e7493308f9746b48b54fdac6d36ab299a90bfde2

I took everything in the table, TX id, fee, size, addresses, etc and saved it as a comma separated value file.  Blockchain explorer tells me this is 8.25 KB.  But my file is only 4.5 KB.  And granted i don't have the merkel root, or the full tx id.  But i am scratching my head as to why the reported size is 2x what it actually weighs as a CSV.  Whats more, when i zipped the csv, it went down to 2.6 bytes.

Why is the blockchain so inefficient at storing data? 

[theymos]

That table doesn't show the input prev_out hashes (32 bytes each) or the input scriptSigs (~138 bytes each). Each line in the "From" column is one input. This info is necessary for the network to function, but it's omitted from that table because it isn't so important when you're interested in blocks. It's all listed on transaction pages and the "raw block" page.

The JSON representation on the raw block page is 32.6 KiB uncompressed and ~9 KiB compressed -- far worse than Bitcoin's binary representation.

Whats more, when i zipped the csv, it went down to 2.6 bytes.

Were you using a magical computer to represent that four-fifths of a bit?

[doobadoo]

Whats more, when i zipped the csv, it went down to 2.6 bytes.

Were you using a magical computer to represent that four-fifths of a bit?

crap you got me, i'm an alien using a base-5 computer.

[unclemantis]

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2ei59BEH4tU/Tf83itgomGI/AAAAAAAAAWE/3kSJxRbyL_E/s1600/Duplos.jpg