From what I am reading, what is stored on the individual computing nodes is a history of hashed transactions and stuff. At some point in the past a miner received a coin as payment and a block starts ( a linked list, some structure of some kind) and grows keeping track of transactions.
1) Does this mean that all transactions since startup are still in the system?
2) Will they all stay there for the next 25, 50, 100 ...... years?
This would imply that if we are at 100 gig now it will get huge. Somehow I have a feeling that I must have this picture wrong.
New blocks are created on average every 10 minutes. Blocks are currently limited to 4 megabytes in size.
There are 1440 minutes in a day, and approximately 365.25 days in a year. If the list grows by 4 megabytes every 10 minutes, that means that:
In 10 years, the list will grow by:
10 years * 365.25 days per year * 1440 minutes per day / 10 minutes per block * 4 megabytes per block =
2,103,840 megabytes =
2.1 terabytesIn 100 years, the list will grow by:
100 years * 365.25 days per year * 1440 minutes per day / 10 minutes per block * 4 megabytes per block =
21,038,400 megabytes =
21 terabytesAccording to Overstock.com it is currently possible to purchase 2 TB of storage for only $82:
This means that
today, you could store
100 years of Bitcoin activity for less than $1000. Would you agree that computer storage continues to get larger and cheaper over time? How cheap and convenient do you think it will be to store 21 TB of data a century from now?
Future generations will have access to technologies that we haven't even thought of yet. Imagine trying to understand today's technology in 1917. Storage of the Bitcoin blockchain won't be a problem for a VERY long time. I expect that a replacement for bitcoin will come along sometime in the next 1000 years. There aren't many currencies that last that long.