The sustained growth of the BTC blockchain in the last four years may be attributed to the introduction of scaling solution SegWit, which effectively doubled block sizes to two megabytes.
The size of the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain has just hit a new milestone with respect to its size. The premier digital currency blockchain size has hit and exceeded the 300,000 MB (300GB) threshold as of September 19th according to Blockchain.com.
The 300GB BTC blockchain size represents the size of the total number of transactions stored on the BTC Blockchain since its inception in its about Ten years of existence. The number also represents the amount of information full mining nodes need to download and keep on their hard drives after synchronizing with Bitcoin’s network.
As transactions are continuously initiated and stored on the network, the BTC blockchain size is subjected to a continuous increase. A few years back, the rate of growth of the BTC Blockchain has been relatively slow compared to today. In the first four years of its life, the BTC blockchain reached 20GB. The meteoric growth of the network peaked in 2016 when the size reached 54GB which may be due to an increase in the number of people using the network. Today, the BTC Blockchain size grows at about 58GB a year.
The relative growth and increase between the BTC and Ethereum (ETH) blockchains have been duly contrasted and it has been discovered that an archival node on the Ethereum blockchain is already over five terabytes in size – and increasing at record speeds with growing block sizes – although a pruned node comes in at just 165GB.
The sustained growth of the BTC blockchain in the last four years may be attributed to the introduction of scaling solution SegWit, which effectively doubled block sizes to two megabytes.
BTC Blockchain and Effect of Size towards Scalability
While the recorded transactions ever made on the Bitcoin Blockchain constitute the bulk of the 300GB, a sizeable number is unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). The unspent transaction outputs are formed when bitcoin is sent and a small portion is sent back as ‘unspent’ bitcoin.
As Utreexo developer Calvin Kim noted, while these UTXOs collectively take up barely 4GB of memory to date, they could create problematic scalability issues in the future and that is what Utreexo is gearing up to solve by compressing these proofs to under one kilobyte and provides a long-term scalability solution as their size grows.
“Utreexo is a hash-based accumulator, which allows unspent outputs to be compressed into a smaller size. There is no loss of security; instead, the burden of keeping track of funds is shifted to the owner of those funds,” the startup said in a blog post.
In addition to solving the bitcoin scalability issues, Coinspeaker reported the launch of the BTC network scalability project dubbed Lightning Network, these projects achieved a new milestone threshold with the overall node capacity crossing 100 BTC.
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