Bitcoin’s distributed ledger is approaching half a terabyte
- BTC price at time of writing – $19,141.87
- Close to 14 years ago, the blockchain was smaller than a kilobyte
- The BTC chain is approximately 432,176,009 kB in size
On January 3, 2009, well over a decade ago, the Bitcoin blockchain had a size of 0.285 kilobytes (kB), or about 285 bytes. However, the blockchain’s ledger currently occupies just over 432 gigabytes or almost half a terabyte.
The Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain is approaching 500 gigabytes, or about half a terabyte, on October 15, 2022. This is necessary to store the entire history of the distributed ledger on one drive.
At the time of writing, it takes more than 432 gigabytes (GB) of space to store the entire BTC blockchain. On January 3, 2009, almost 14 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto launched the blockchain with a size of less than a kilobyte, or about 285 bytes.
Bitcoin’s Blockchain is approaching 500 Gigabytes in size
Bitcoin’s distributed ledger did not reach 1 MB in size until February 16, 2009, and by February 13, 2012, the blockchain was approximately 1,000,000 kB or 1 GB in size.
The BTC chain was about 432,176,009kB in size on Saturday, when it was 432GB today. To store the entire blockchain network, miners and full nodes require more than 432 GB of storage to manage the chain.
According to current calculations, there are 14,299 available full nodes at the time of writing. This indicates that thousands of nodes host a complete copy of the blockchain network. Light clients are wallets that do not run a full node and use a simplified payment verification (SPV) system.
SPV clients sync with nearby bitcoin full nodes validating instead of hosting a full node. Full nodes are used by full node operators, miners, and institutions such as exchanges, payment companies, and custodians, while SPV wallets make up the majority of the crypto community’s wallets today.
Storing BTC and other distributed ledgers requires a significant amount of disk space.
The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network has 186 gigabytes, the Bitcoinsv (BSV) network has more than 7 terabytes (TB), and the Dash (DASH) network has about 27 gigabytes. Ethereum (ETH) is just five gigabytes away from 0.5TB at 495GB.
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How many Bitcoins are there out there?
The software of Bitcoin limits the total supply, which will never exceed 21,000,000 coins. Mining is the process by which new coins are created: Miners capture transactions as they are relayed over the network and package them into blocks, which are protected by intricate cryptographic calculations.
For each block successfully added to the blockchain, the miners receive rewards as payment for using their computational resources.
The reward for each block at the time of Bitcoin’s launch was fifty bitcoins: every 210,000 new blocks mined, which takes the network about four years, this number is halved.
The block reward has been halved three times by 2020 to 6.25 bitcoins.
Bitcoin has not been premiered, meaning that no coins have been mined or distributed among the founders before it was made public.
However, the early network participants were able to regularly mine for a significant amount of coins because there was little competition among miners in the early years of BTC’s existence: Satoshi Nakamoto alone is believed to own more than one million Bitcoins.
Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional money exchange systems. She is also fascinated by the blockchain technology and its function.
