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Topic: Is the feature "reclaiming disk space" really implemented in Bitcoin Core? - page 2. (Read 2207 times)

staff
Activity: 4172
Merit: 8419
That being said, while Satoshi's idea with reclaiming disk space is not implemented exactly as he describes, we do have blockchain pruning. This however does require still downloading all 110+ GB however it will not all exist at the same time on disk. Currently pruning will delete on the fly, once a block becomes old enough, it is deleted to make space for the next block. Pruning has been around for over a year now, it was first introduced in Bitcoin Core 0.11.
You make it sound like pruning is worse, in fact it's tens of times more efficient than whats described in the whitepaper. Both have the need to transfer data in the first place (note that it's 'reclaiming disk space' not 'avoiding bandwidth usage' Smiley ).

To the unanswered part of the OP's post:

Sites like blockchain.info aren't nodes. They are custom databases that take up many terabytes of space. They don't validate things (at least not completely) and often show invalid data.  What they do is unrelated to how nodes work.
PPA
newbie
Activity: 7
Merit: 1
Thanks.
I am going to investigate further on the "pruning feature".
staff
Activity: 3374
Merit: 6530
Just writing some code
First of all, Satoshi proposed several ideas which are either infeasible with current technology (e.g. fraud proofs) or are just stupid to do right now with current technology (the original transaction replacement stuff).

That being said, while Satoshi's idea with reclaiming disk space is not implemented exactly as he describes, we do have blockchain pruning. This however does require still downloading all 110+ GB however it will not all exist at the same time on disk. Currently pruning will delete on the fly, once a block becomes old enough, it is deleted to make space for the next block. Pruning has been around for over a year now, it was first introduced in Bitcoin Core 0.11.
PPA
newbie
Activity: 7
Merit: 1
PPA
newbie
Activity: 7
Merit: 1
In Satoshi Nakamoto's paper we can read this:
Quote
Reclaiming Disk Space
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.

Is it really implemented by Bitcoin Core?

When I used some web site such as https://blockchain.info or https://blockexplorer.com, it seems that we can scan any transaction of any block.
Does this mean that the sites above save an archive of the blockchain?

Does the Bitcoin Core discards some old transactions to save space, and saves a compact blockchain?
Note that according to https://bitcoin.org/en/download, the blockchain size is over 100Gb.
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