92 gigs? Wowwzers.

[Kakmakr]

it should be noted that there is a slight compounding growth experienced by the blockchain, and so it might be something like 2035/2040 that it hits 1TB.

Obviously if the rate is different then the date will change, but the statement wasn't about attempting to predict future growth rates.  The statement was about what would happen if it continued at this rate.

That being said...

Please explain. What is the cause of the compounding growth? I'm not aware of any.

It's difficult to predict how many blocks will be less than full in the future.  If EVERY block is COMPLETELY full from now on, then the rate of growth will be about 4.38 GB per month.  Unless the maximum allowed blocksize (or the average time between blocks) is changed in the future, the blockchain won't grow any faster than that.

Just another reason why we should not increase the Block size to something much bigger than it is now. The average block is not full at all, so we need to consider if any upgrade is necessary at this moment. SegWit and the Lightning network would help a lot with capacity issues and would also prevent that the Blockchain would grow to big to keep up with storage limitations. < Not that we have any issues with it, because it is fairly cheap>   

[Gleb Gamow]

At this rate it will a terabyte by 2020

You aren't very good at maths are you?

The current size is less than 100 GB.

The current rate of growth is less than 2.7 GB per month.

There are 39 more months until 2020.

Less than 2.7 GB per month times 39 months is less than 105.3

At this rate it will grow by less than 105.3 GB by 2020.

Current size (less than) 100GB plus less than 105.3 GB of growth means that:

At this rate it will be less than 205.3 GB by 2020.

At this rate it will be a terabyte by 2045.

Some people have a hard time with math you know, you can't always make fun of them for their disabilities 

I still don't understand how people can mess math like that up, however it should be noted that there is a slight compounding growth experienced by the blockchain, and so it might be something like 2035/2040 that it hits 1TB. I could be wrong about that though.

Now I'm confused!  Is that 1TB in the claws of one or two African or European swallows?

[magemist]

Last time I recalled it was at like 52 or something.

Then it's been a year since the last time you looked at it. It hasn't been since late 2015.

If the blocks are all full, then the blockchain grows by about 52.6GB per year.  Empty blocks and blocks that are less than 1 MB in size occur frequently, so the actual growth over the past year has been more like 39GB.

Yeah that is about right, but I just don't see why people want to download the whole thing. If I wanted to download it, it would take a day or two seeing as the internet speeds in Australia are f*cking sh*t.

At this rate it will a terabyte by 2020

You better go back to year 1 and re-learn your multiplication. how does 52 times 4 equal 900? What the hell is this.

LOL, I was trying to be dramatic.

I rather go to acting classes than boring math classes at any rate.
I'll leave the math to my accountant or some asian nerd to do that for me.

[Kprawn]

People are looking at this in the wrong way... the second hand hard drives are fairly inexpensive and you can get 1 TB hard drives for

between $20 to $40 each... https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/second-hand-hard-disk.html ... So even if the Blockchain size double

every year, we would still be able to store it on second hand/ used hard drives. So why is this an issue again?

[Velkro]

It still costs under $50 to store the Blockchain in full. I don't see it ever being a big deal. + not everyone has a node so doesn't technically need it  we'll see a bigger Blockchain if the block size is raised and more transactions start going through.

Don't know how u calculate it, but it depends heavly on many factors.
In the end, its better to find some optimization of storing blockchain, compression, i dont know but it should be considered now. After couple years it will be harder and harder to store whole blockchain.

[gentlemand]

The core developers should find a way to improve the blockchain pruning methods and also work together with 3rd parties to have a good implementation of off chain transactions. Off chain transactions will hit 2 birds with one stone. It will help scale Bitcoin and it will handle the load away from bloating the blockchain.

As ever it's the bandwidth and not the storage that's the problem. There's nothing developers can do about that. Pruning of some sort would help make it a more modest download in future but it's already far more than my connection could take without coming around and slapping me.

[HITTI2]

I was 18weeks behind in the blockchain. Took nearly 8 hours to download.

I have a 10MB/S Connection.

[Wendigo]

I haven't run Bitcoin Core ever because I am not interested in operating a node or using it for daily transactions so I have never installed it on my laptop. But I am curious if there is any difference in performance between running Core on a normal HDD or on a SSD. Because I would assume that a SSD would make the update process speedier. Anyways a 240GB SSD costs as much as a 1TB HDD so I guess I would go with the SSD if 240GB will last me till 2020 plus I could always repurpose the SSD later on.

[5dollarbill]

lol, my steam library is bigger than the blockchain haha blockchain size doesn't seem to be a problem neither does it look like it will be problem in next few years disk space is cheap, even where its heavily taxed!!! and flash storage/ssd will be cheaper and cheaper biggest prob is bandwidth, maybe, but even that...

[calkob]

Whats the point of downloading the entire source or the heavy hard drive hitting wallets and not just the light wallets ? Is it because that allows you to host a node ?

I would say that that is the reason, why would you bother running core otherwise.  i run core because i think its important that we have as many nodes going as possible, i know for most in the world that is not feasible but if you can then you should.  I actually run some of my lightwallets with my own node as the trusted source. 

[Benarand]

lol, my steam library is bigger than the blockchain haha blockchain size doesn't seem to be a problem neither does it look like it will be problem in next few years disk space is cheap, even where its heavily taxed!!! and flash storage/ssd will be cheaper and cheaper biggest prob is bandwidth, maybe, but even that...

If I remember correctly, the block chain size of the Ethereum is already 70 GB after one year of existence.

[coins101]

At this rate it will a terabyte by 2020

You aren't very good at maths are you?

The current size is less than 100 GB.

The current rate of growth is less than 2.7 GB per month.

There are 39 more months until 2020.

Less than 2.7 GB per month times 39 months is less than 105.3

At this rate it will grow by less than 105.3 GB by 2020.

Current size (less than) 100GB plus less than 105.3 GB of growth means that:

At this rate it will be less than 205.3 GB by 2020.

At this rate it will be a terabyte by 2045.

Why i think you are wrong:

My guess is that the Bitcoin Blockchain is growing at around 4% per month.


.....

If you check the stats on blockchain.info, bitcoin size growth rate is not linear.

[xdrpx]

I had a similar problem recently hosting the same on azure cloud based Bitcoin full node. Although I did have a free plan for 3 years thanks to my Visual studio subscription by Microsoft, the costs were high on azure to buy disk storage. On my personal computer I have several empty hard disks and I can get several of these for very cheap, but bandwidth to download the whole blockchain is limited. Also my ISP doesn't allow me to host anything unless I purchase a public IP with unblocked ports from them at a very high rate. 92 gigs infact isn't much, but it depends on your network capacity and expenses to download it.

[DannyHamilton]

Why i think you are wrong:

My guess is that the Bitcoin Blockchain is growing at around 4% per month.

That graph is based on some assumptions about the future that are uncertain.

IF the max blocksize is increased significantly, THEN the blockchain could grow at an exponential rate.

However, such a change to the protocol would require the consensus of the users.

As the protocol exists today, growth in the future will be linear (as it has been for the past 12 to 18 months).

If you check the stats on blockchain.info, bitcoin size growth rate is not linear.

Actually, if you look at the stats on blockchain.info, ever since bitcoin reached full 1 megabyte blocks regularly, the growth HAS been linear.

The protocol has a 1 megabyte limit on maximum blocksize, so when there were less than 1 megabyte worth of transactions being created in the early days, the block size was able to grow as users created more transactions per day.  Once the 1 megabyte limit was reached, the block size stopped growing and the blockchain changed from exponential growth to linear growth.

[Youresioure]

The space-issue could be a future problem of Bitcoin soon. I see more and more people pointing out its huge size. Our HDDs are growing too but will the regular HDDs development keep pace with Bitcoin network's development?

[coins101]

Why i think you are wrong:

My guess is that the Bitcoin Blockchain is growing at around 4% per month.

That graph is based on some assumptions about the future that are uncertain.

IF the max blocksize is increased significantly, THEN the blockchain could grow at an exponential rate.

However, such a change to the protocol would require the consensus of the users.

As the protocol exists today, growth in the future will be linear (as it has been for the past 12 to 18 months).

If you check the stats on blockchain.info, bitcoin size growth rate is not linear.

Actually, if you look at the stats on blockchain.info, ever since bitcoin reached full 1 megabyte blocks regularly, the growth HAS been linear.

The protocol has a 1 megabyte limit on maximum blocksize, so when there were less than 1 megabyte worth of transactions being created in the early days, the block size was able to grow as users created more transactions per day.  Once the 1 megabyte limit was reached, the block size stopped growing and the blockchain changed from exponential growth to linear growth.

You just helped answer the question. Hitting the upper limit now just means that the block sizes will be increased at some point within the next 5 to 10 years (hopefully within the next year).

When it does get increased, growth will be stop being linear against the upper max. So your originally point that the blockchain will only grow by ~100GiB over the next 100 years (can't remember the actual number of decades you used), is still wrong.

[coins101]

The space-issue could be a future problem of Bitcoin soon. I see more and more people pointing out its huge size. Our HDDs are growing too but will the regular HDDs development keep pace with Bitcoin network's development?

Forget about hardware.

Network bandwidth capacity is going to be where people find they have problems.

[DannyHamilton]

You just helped answer the question. Hitting the upper limit now just means that the block sizes will be increased at some point within the next 5 to 10 years (hopefully within the next year).

Hitting the limit does not mean that the maximum block size WILL be increased.  Some people feel the maximum block size should be increased, and others feel it should not.

Regardless, it probably won't be increased without the consensus of an overwhelming majority of the users.  Time will tell whether that consensus can be arranged or not.

When it does get increased, growth will be stop being linear against the upper max.

You mean "if" it does get increased.

So your originally point that the blockchain will only grow by ~100GiB over the next 100 years (can't remember the actual number of decades you used), is still wrong.

Nope. My point is accurate and right.

My reply was based on the statement of "at this rate" (made by the person I was replying to), meaning at the rate of growth right now today, not some imagined or possible future growth, nor some historical growth rate that existed before 2015.  If instead the person I was replying to had said "if we allow blocksize to increase by 4% per year in the future", then I would have gone with completely different calculations.  However, that's not the statement that I was replying to.

[coins101]

If we stay at 1mb blocks indefinitely, Core will be forked into a smaller chain.

It is a case of when, not if. 

[Holliday]

If we stay at 1mb blocks indefinitely, Core will be forked into a smaller chain.

It is a case of when, not if. 

I think you mean "larger chain".