Okay, my hard drive is a bit cramped, and the Blockchain for my Bitcoin client is completely sucking up my free space. I want to know how much room I need to be prepared to lose.

This isn't a duplicate of the other questions - those had answers that were highly impractical - I'm not sure if they dealt more with the theory of the blockchain or what, but the filesizes were way off.

For example, right now, http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size says that the current blockchain size is 6073 MB, which is complete BS - the cumulative size of ~/.bitcoin/blocks/*.dat is 6970 MB, and it's not even done yet.

Basically, what I want is a realistic, down-to-earth estimate of how much hard disk space the blockchain is going to cost me. Not the theory, not the "data minus overhead", the actual cost of the .dat files.

blockchain

JamesTheAwesomeDude

Posted 2013-04-01T13:59:12.943

Reputation: 371

I can't offer a formula. I can only offer that it will continue to grow at a rate equal to or greater than its current rate, likely the latter. If hard drive space is a significant issue, consider using a lightweight client like Multibit or Electrum. – Colin Dean – 2013-04-01T14:25:48.097

The latest version of Bitcoin-Qt also stores all unspent tx's so that could also contribute to the size? – lurf jurv – 2013-04-01T20:46:02.987

You may already know this, but there are clients such as Electrum that do not require local storage of the blockchain. – rdb – 2014-01-21T11:10:06.497

Answers

The blockchain sizes of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Dogecoin, Peercoin and Namecoin are listed here at https://bitinfocharts.com/ (scroll down to Blockchain Size)

As of today (2015-07-12) the sizes are (sorted by market capitalization):

Bitcoin             Litecoin          Dash              Dogecoin          Peercoin          Namecoin
44.73 GB            4.64 GB           1.01 GB           11.41 GB          0.4191 GB         2.64 GB
$4,477,078,707 USD  $209,054,841 USD  $23,217,866 USD   $20,686,200 USD   $15,897,328 USD   $9,888,883 USD

Note that Dogecoin, although very new, has a very big chain already, where Peercoin has by far the smallest.

Your question

On my hard disk the .bitcoin directory uses 45 GiB = 48 GB.

erik

Posted 2013-04-01T13:59:12.943

Reputation: 536

wow.. its now at Blockchain Size - 55.04 GB – Dinesh Rajan – 2015-10-04T15:24:06.313

almost doubled in less that a year @DineshRajan! – Francesco Yoshi Gobbo – 2016-08-04T17:55:11.427

As of July 12th 2017 a full node running on my machine requires 130 GB of disk space:

$ du -s ./bitcoin-data
136467234   bitcoin-data

I have the txindex option enabled (txindex=1 in bitcoin.conf) so the above includes 11.5 GB of optional transaction index data, this is not enabled by default.

The size of just the block data is 116.29 GB and the chain state is 2.33 GB.

If you do not have enough free disk space you can run Bitcoin with pruning enabled, this will delete old block files, set prune=550 in bitcoin.conf (550 is the minimal value) and it will automatically prune the block data to stay under 550 MB.

This makes the actual size with pruning enabled around 2.86 GB (block data + chain state).

Fabian

Posted 2013-04-01T13:59:12.943

Reputation: 31

On my Mac, the blocks directory consumes 7.8 GB of physical space. The entire Application Support folder takes 8.0GB.

For those not familiar with Macs, the Application Support folder is somewhat like a hidden data folder. It is where applications keep their data other than the documents users actually work with. (Which are usually in the Documents directory.) It is where the Qt client keeps both the blockchain, address book, wallet, and other databases.

David Ogren

Posted 2013-04-01T13:59:12.943

Reputation: 2 982

Wow, right before I discovered that, I had been storing the blockchain on a symlinked 8GB SD card - 2.4% free space by the time it finished... Forunately, I managed to kick out some space on my HD... – JamesTheAwesomeDude – 2013-04-03T03:33:33.860

The Bitcoin mainnet blockchain + block reverse data is currently roughly 50GB after sync, and the vast majority of that data is in the last 100,000 blocks.

With the 8 mb block limit going into effect, and increasing transaction volume I wouldn't be surprised to see this double in the next 18 months.

If that is too much disk space for you to devote you can use an SPV client, or turn on block pruning in the latest official bitcoind release.

Matt

Posted 2013-04-01T13:59:12.943

Reputation: 520

Where do I find the *actual* blockchain size?

Answers

Your question

Where do I find the actual blockchain size?