The blockchain is becoming bigger and the trend is that less people store it in its own computer and use online wallets or some other alternatives (mainly in cell phones which have little memory), possibly in the future will be necessary datacenter infrastructure to store the entire blockchain.
As far as I know the bitcoin network need many nodes having the entire blockchain to be reliable, so the huge blockchain will affect the bitcoin network?
The blockchain is currently only 29 GB in size. According to
Western Digital, you can purchase a 6 TB internal hard drive for a PC for only $270 today. That doesn't sound like "datacenter infrastructure" to me.
Currently the blocksize is limited to a maximum of 1 MB per block, and the protocol limits the number of blocks to approximately 1 block every 10 minutes. Doing some simple arithmetic:
(365 days per year) times
(24 hours per day) times
(60 minutes per hour) equals
(525600 minutes per year) divided by
(10 minutes per block) times
(1 megabyte per block) equals
(52560 megabytes per year) divided by
(1000 megabytes per gigabyte) equals
52.56 gigabytes per year
It appears that unless/until the protocol rules change, the blockchain can't grow by much more than 52.56 gigabytes per year.
Since 6 TB is 6,000 gigabytes, we can see with some simple arithmetic:
(6000 gigabytes) divided by
(52.56 gigabytes per year) equals
114.16 years
.
How much has the size of a hard drive grown in the past 114 years, and how much has the cost per byte decreased over that same amount of time? Taking that into consideration, how big do you suppose non-volatile storage (can we even reliably predict if hard drives will be the future storage media) will be 114 years from now? How much do you suppose that storage will cost per byte?
Also, keep in mind that most blocks are not even using the entire 1 megabyte available to them yet. Until they are, this further increases the amount of time until the 6 TB hard drive is full.
There has been some recent talk about increasing the maximum block size. If this occurs, blocks might eventually grow bigger than 1 megabyte. It is difficult to predict how quickly they will grow or how large they will grow (it depends on how quickly bitcoin becomes popular and how popular it becomes). Obviously if blocks increase above 1 megabyte, it will reduce the amount of time until the blockchain fills a 6 TB hard drive.
It is also important to remember that bitcoin was designed with the intention that full nodes would only be run in large data centers. Satoshi expected that there would eventually be less than 100,000 full nodes on the bitcoin network:
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I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN.
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If the network becomes very large, like over 100,000 nodes, this is what we'll use to allow common users to do transactions without being full blown nodes. At that stage, most users should start running client-only software and only the specialist server farms keep running full network nodes, kind of like how the usenet network has consolidated.
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The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.
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