How does the Blockchain store so many records without being too big?

[alan2here]

How does the blockchain store a record of everything without being so large as to require scientific notation to denote it's size?

[joshlang]

How does the blockchain store a record of everything without being so large as to require scientific notation to denote it's size?

Mostly sorcery.

...That, and it's not exactly like there's a huge amount of data yet.  Most transactions are 1k or less? 

[DannyHamilton]

How does the blockchain store a record of everything without being so large as to require scientific notation to denote it's size?

It uses metric to denote its size instead.

Current size is approximately 9 Gigabytes in size.

That is:

7.73 X 10¹⁰ bits in size.

If it grows to be more than
8.796 X 10¹² bits

We'll just start talking about how many Terabytes it is.

[MysteryMiner]

Bitcoin was constructed with efficiency in mind. The signatures are small and transactions usually are less than 1Kb in size.

Modern harddrives are actually amazing technology. 3TB on WD Red that are common today was science fiction 15 years ago. Current 9GB blockchain containing all past 4 years does not even make a pixelated stip when stored on that drive.

[jdbtracker]

for the records, Bitcoin only uses the amount being transferred with ECDSA encryption, a very compact form of encryption, to verify transactions. it is very small using no more that .1kb per record, gets bigger if you take many inputs and make it into one output.

[alan2here]

0.1kb * (60,000 per day) = 6MB per day right now :-o

I know that HD specs tend to increase exponentially too. Though I still like the possibility I've heard of only generally storing the latest part of the block-chain instead.

I presumed that each record would somehow be distributed over the file and some sort of computational search that further optimised may even be required or similar to add records and that it would scale as perhaps sqrt(n) not _linearly_ and by now each record would end up being nice and small, maybe the equivalent to 4bytes each or similar -> 00000000, 00000000, 00000000, 00000000.

Good point about how scientific notation is already used.

[pmlyon]

At 0.1kB per transaction and 10 billion people, I get 1TB per day required for each person do be able to do one direct, p2p transaction on the blockchain per day. I'd love to see the core software being written today be able to handle that volume, for when the computers of tomorrow have the raw power to deal with it.