I was updating my laptop and its bitcoin wallet, and noticed that the blockchain file is now taking up 53 GB of my SSD's space!
Isn't there a shorter version of the blockchain, maybe one that starts at block 380,000 or so? I don't need the whole damn chain, it is just wasted disk space.
Unfortunately block pruning has not been completed yet so you can't spend coins when you enable pruning as of now. If you have enough space, synchronize it and send it to another HD wallet like Electrum after you backup the seed. Then keep a backup of wallet.dat and delete the %appdata%/Bitcoin files.
It isn't recommended to extract your private key but if you absolutely need to, you can. Go to console, type in this to unlock wallet:
walletpassphrase [walletpasscodehere] 600
if you have a password and use this
dumpprivkey [Address here]
. You should get your private key of the address and you can proceed to import into another client.