What prevents the blockchain from becoming impossibly large? - page 2.

kinghajj

member

Activity: 66

Merit: 10

Quote

To enable this, the blockchain uses a merkle tree to organize the transaction records in such a way that client software can locally delete portions of its own database it knows it will never need, such as earlier transaction records of Bitcoins that have changed ownership multiple times.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin#Confirmations

AFAIK, however, this is still unimplemented in the main Bitcoin client. But at least a solution is known.

farlack

legendary

Activity: 1310

Merit: 1000

We're all going to need 10tb ssd to use bitcoin Cheesy

taltamir

full member

Activity: 196

Merit: 100

2009-01-03 - bitcoin introduced according to wikipedia
2012-09-21 - blockchain ~3GB - according to https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1209059
2013-02-20 - my bitcoin data folder is 13.4GB (6GB for "blocks" subfolder + 172MB chainstate subfolder + 7.07GB for blkindex.dat and blk0001.dat through blk0003.dat)

At this rate it bitcoin will become unusable due to the chain files becoming too large to store.
Is there any mechanism in place (or one that is being designed) to prevent this? If so, where can I find more info about the mechanism for preventing data chain bloat?

Topic: What prevents the blockchain from becoming impossibly large? - page 2. (Read 2599 times)