Well over a decade ago, on January 3, 2009, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain was 0.285 kilobytes (kB) or around 285 bytes. Today, however, the blockchain’s ledger is nearly half a terabyte, or roughly 432 gigabytes.
On October 15, 2022, the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain is getting closer to reaching 500 gigabytes, or roughly half a terabyte of space, in order to store the entire distributed ledger’s history on a drive. At the time of writing, storing the entire BTC blockchain requires more than 432,000 megabytes (MB) or 432 gigabytes (GB) of space.
Close to 14 years ago on January 3, 2009, the blockchain was less than a kilobyte in size or approximately 285 bytes, the day Satoshi Nakamoto launched the network. It wasn’t until February 16, 2009 that Bitcoin’s distributed ledger surpassed 1 MB in size and by February 13, 2012, the blockchain was approximately 1,000,000 kB or 1 GB in size.
At 432 GB today, the BTC chain is approximately 432,176,009 kB in size on Saturday. Miners and full nodes are required to store the entire blockchain network, which means they need more than 432 GB of space to manage the entire chain.
At the time of writing, there are 14,299 reachable full nodes according to today’s metrics, which means thousands of nodes host a full copy of the blockchain network. Wallets that don’t manage a full node are called light clients, and they utilize a simplified payment verification (SPV) scheme.
SPV clients do not host a full node but rather sync with nearby validating bitcoin full nodes. Most of the wallets used by the crypto community today are SPV wallets, while full nodes are used by full node operators, miners, and institutions like exchanges, payment companies, and custodians.
BTC is not the only distributed ledger that takes a lot of disk space to store. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is 186 GB, Bitcoinsv (BSV) is over 7 terabytes (TB), and the Dash (DASH) network is around 27 GB. At 495 GB, Ethereum (ETH) is only five gigabytes away from reaching 0.5 TB.
What do you think about the size of the Bitcoin blockchain and its steady growth since 2009? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.
Ripple CEO: SEC Lawsuit Over XRP 'Has Gone Exceedingly Well'
The CEO of Ripple Labs says that the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against him and his company over XRP "has gone exceedingly well." He stressed: "This case is important, not just for Ripple, it’s ... read more.
Well over a decade ago, on January 3, 2009, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain was 0.285 kilobytes (kB) or around 285 bytes. Today, however, the blockchain’s ledger is nearly half a terabyte, or roughly 432 gigabytes.
On October 15, 2022, the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain is getting closer to reaching 500 gigabytes, or roughly half a terabyte of space, in order to store the entire distributed ledger’s history on a drive. At the time of writing, storing the entire BTC blockchain requires more than 432,000 megabytes (MB) or 432 gigabytes (GB) of space.
Close to 14 years ago on January 3, 2009, the blockchain was less than a kilobyte in size or approximately 285 bytes, the day Satoshi Nakamoto launched the network. It wasn’t until February 16, 2009 that Bitcoin’s distributed ledger surpassed 1 MB in size and by February 13, 2012, the blockchain was approximately 1,000,000 kB or 1 GB in size.
At 432 GB today, the BTC chain is approximately 432,176,009 kB in size on Saturday. Miners and full nodes are required to store the entire blockchain network, which means they need more than 432 GB of space to manage the entire chain.
At the time of writing, there are 14,299 reachable full nodes according to today’s metrics, which means thousands of nodes host a full copy of the blockchain network. Wallets that don’t manage a full node are called light clients, and they utilize a simplified payment verification (SPV) scheme.
SPV clients do not host a full node but rather sync with nearby validating bitcoin full nodes. Most of the wallets used by the crypto community today are SPV wallets, while full nodes are used by full node operators, miners, and institutions like exchanges, payment companies, and custodians.
BTC is not the only distributed ledger that takes a lot of disk space to store. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is 186 GB, Bitcoinsv (BSV) is over 7 terabytes (TB), and the Dash (DASH) network is around 27 GB. At 495 GB, Ethereum (ETH) is only five gigabytes away from reaching 0.5 TB.
What do you think about the size of the Bitcoin blockchain and its steady growth since 2009? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.
Ripple CEO: SEC Lawsuit Over XRP 'Has Gone Exceedingly Well'
The CEO of Ripple Labs says that the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against him and his company over XRP "has gone exceedingly well." He stressed: "This case is important, not just for Ripple, it’s ... read more.
For a couple of years now, MEV-Boost relays or Flashbots have become popular tools in order to gather the maximum value that can be extracted from Ethereum’s block production. However, in recent times, Flashbots have been controversial as people believe the technology threatens Ethereum’s censorship-resistance. This is because Flashbots account for 48% of blocks that are compliant with government-enforced regulations.
While Ethereum has been complimented for meeting the demands of environmentalists, critics believe the blockchain network made a trade-off by increasing validator centralization, and the probability of rising censorship for a so-called ‘greener’ blockchain. The day after The Merge, when Ethereum transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) network to a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, PoW supporters criticized Ethereum over the increased possibility of validator censorship. Data had shown that more than 59% of all the staked ethereum (ETH) was held by four companies.
I have never been more excited about the future of Flashbots. https://t.co/hSgI2XMFDG
— @bertcmiller ⚡️🤖 (@bertcmiller) October 14, 2022
Although, some people dismissed the critics, like the Bitcoin supporter and blogger Eric Wall, who told his Twitter followers that the liquid staking company “Lido isn’t even a pool.” Wall further noted that “Lido can’t decide what blocks anyone of their underlying node operators mine.” Following the topic of increasing validator centralization, another discussion concerning the use of Flashbots or MEV-Boost relays has heightened. Flashbots emerged in November 2020, and researchers from Bitmex describe what MEV-Boost relay technology does in a Flashbots report published last May.
“Flashbots works as follows — Searchers analyse the blockchain and memory pool for MEV opportunities,” the Bitmex report on Flashbots explains. “When they find such an opportunity they create a transaction or bundle of transactions which exploits it. They then submit these transactions to the centralised Flashbots server. These transactions also include a payment for the miners. The idea here is that a searcher will no longer bother broadcasting their MEV transactions to the memory pool anymore and will only use the Flashbots system.”
The conversation concerning Flashbots isn’t really about the technology of finding the maximum value that can be extracted from Ethereum’s block production, as the discussion has been solely based on transaction censorship stemming from MEV-Boost relays. For instance, after the U.S. Treasury Department’s watchdog the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) banned Tornado Cash and several ethereum addresses, crypto supporters believe Flashbots will censors ether transactions. That’s because some MEV-Boost relays or Flashbots are centralized and are regulated under OFAC rules.
At the time of writing, 48% of block production has been enforced by OFAC complaint MEV-Boost relays, according to mevwatch.info statistics. Metrics from flashbots.net’s transparency page show that 46% of blocks on October 14, were OFAC compliant.
Martin Köppelmann, the co-founder of Gnosis, tweeted about the issue when the OFAC-compliant block production was above 51%. “We reached another sad milestone in censorship: 51%,” Köppelmann wrote. “This means if the censoring validators would now stop attesting to non-censoring blocks they would eventually form the canonical, 100% censoring chain.”
The Gnosis co-founder added:
Dear Flashbots team – I spoke to many of you personally and you committed to take actions if censorship becomes worse – but if not now, when then?
According to the Flashbots team and product head Robert Miller, Flashbots is working on a solution to address censorship concerns with a tool called SUAVE. The SUAVE tool is set to be released next week, according to insiders. Furthermore, Flashbots co-founder Stephane Gosselin left the project over disagreements regarding the ethics behind censorship. Speaking exclusively with the theblock.co’s contributor Jeremy Nation, Gosselin told the reporter that censorship resistance is very important.
“In the short term, I am hopeful that validators will avoid connecting to relays that perform censorship,” Gosselin told the publication in a direct message on Twitter. “Blockspace suppliers putting economic pressure against censorship will go a long way to making sure it does not become ubiquitous,” the Flashbots co-founder added. At Devcon VI, the Flashbots team introduced the new SUAVE tool to the audience, and further explained that the project is 100% against censorship.
“[Phil Daian] is stating that he is 100% against censorship and though flashbots does censor today they want to fight censorship and the way to do that is through [open source], research and open data,” the Twitter user Lefteris Karapetsas wrote during Daian’s Devcon VI presentation.
What do you think about the controversy surrounding the MEV-Boost relays or Flashbots technology? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.
Ripple CEO: SEC Lawsuit Over XRP 'Has Gone Exceedingly Well'
The CEO of Ripple Labs says that the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against him and his company over XRP "has gone exceedingly well." He stressed: "This case is important, not just for Ripple, it’s ... read more.
Source From : News