It is because all smart contracts are stored in the blockchain.
I did recently create a wallet which to my knowledge is a contract of very basic form. I do however remain a little reluctant to believe that my wallet accounts for over 70 GB of data.
Sorry I did not see that it was 70GB of data, you might have multiple instances ETH clients?
As stated in my first post, I invoke the following command to launch eth via a batfile [start eth -d Q:\the.MlNE\Ethereum] within Mist's subdirectories followed by Mist a few seconds later which successfully detects my eth node.
What are the directory names? That have this big amount of data, can you see where the data is stored? Are they hidden files?
Ethereum/d4e56740/blocks ~74.5 GB
The directory structure is as follows: Ethereum/d4e56740/12041/state ~3.5 GB
Ethereum/d4e56740/12041/extras ~13GB
You must have multiple blockchains. I'm still not sure what you have in the extras folder though. It might be different clients and blockchains, when the fork happened did you do a geth update?
I originally launched eth from a Mist distribution of about 3-4 weeks of age. I never used geth as a node unless Mist is somehow using it while also running eth.
Once eth is launched via my batfile, Mist successfully detects it by indicating it found a running node and thus proceeds to synchronizing the blockchain. The reason why I insist on using eth instead of geth is because from the information I've gathered, geth does not support solo GPU mining and is restricted to CPU mining only which I have no interest in. I would be grateful if anyone can shed some light as to which node is the better of the two and whether my previous statement is indeed true.
I came to notice that my hard drive which is dedicated to blockchains reached maximum capacity and after a little investigation, I discovered that my "blocks" folder in my Ethereum directory weighs 74.5 GB (80,050,787,860 bytes) for 840,984 Files which seems extremely odd. There's also an "extra" & "state" folder which additionally weigh ~3.5 GB and ~13GB respectively. Cryptominingblog created a post a few hours ago stating that Ethereum's directory is about 16 GB so this only adds to my confusion.
I invoke the following command to launch eth via a batfile [start eth -d Q:\the.MlNE\Ethereum] within Mist's subdirectories followed by Mist a few seconds later which is of the latest build.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
That's abnormal, your folder size is high, consider deleting everything and reinstalling again.
Protip: if you run geth.exe with the "--fast" flag its going to download a trimmed version of the blockchain, making it under 2 GB of size.
Is it possible that eth&geth's blockchain differ in size and if not, can the blockchain previouisly created by eth be used with geth or must I re-download it from square 1?