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I just started Bitcoin-qt for the first time, and it is syncing. How much space does the blockchain take up? I have my drive heavily partitioned, and my /home partition (linux mint) is only about 20GB. Does anyone have a size accurate within 100MB?

tkbx
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3 Answers3

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At the moment, it's about 2.6GB, but it will be growing with time.

You can try looking into using an eWallet or some lightweight clients if you are tight on the disc space. Their space requirement is minimal in comparison, but the security model they offer is different. The lightweight clients are developed by other people than the core Bitcoin team, so you have to know that you can trust them (haven't yet heard about a case of the lightweight clients being malicious). With the eWallets you put the security of your money in the hands of the third party and their server. There have been incidents of people losing a lot of coins because of this (like MyBitcoin), but if ran well and by trustworthy people, your Bitcoins can be more secure than on your computer.

ThePiachu
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  • But you can only mine with Bitcoin-qt or the daemon equivalent, right? – tkbx Jul 05 '12 at 04:19
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    No, not exactly. You don't need your own client running to mine. You just need to point your mining software at a pool. You do however need the daemon if you want to solo-mine. – Highly Irregular Jul 05 '12 at 05:18
  • Saying that an eWallet offers less security is wrong. It's a different security instead. Keeping your wallet unencrypted on your disk, vs. keeping it properly encrypted in a remote server? – o0'. Jul 05 '12 at 13:53
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    @Lohoris I said that they CAN offer less security, it doesn't mean that they do. One or either way, I clarified my statement. – ThePiachu Jul 05 '12 at 14:56
  • Much better now! – o0'. Jul 05 '12 at 15:22
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This thread in bitcointalk was posted on June 30th 2012 and discusses a graph of the size of the blockchain over time and predicts it into the future. Currently, the graph looks like this: enter image description here

Highly Irregular
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  • So in ~50 years, the storage will be more important for "pro-miners" than the GPU, it would seem. – tkbx Jul 05 '12 at 04:21
  • This doesn't include the block headers or the index, so roughly multiply by oh, say 1.25 to get in the right ballpark.
    • http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size
     – Stephen Gornick Jul 05 '12 at 05:02
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    @lucase.62, the storage issue is likely to be a temporary one for end users. More info here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/478/516 and on general scalability here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability – Highly Irregular Jul 05 '12 at 05:22
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    @lucase.62 Not really, just think back 50 years back and try remembering how big hard drives were available then in comparison to now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png Pretty insignificant in comparison. The block chain probably won't outgrow cheap storage capacities in a long time. – ThePiachu Jul 05 '12 at 15:01
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Here are the current file sizes:

$ date
Thu Jul  5 00:21:12 PDT 2012
$ ls -l blk*
-rw------- 1 chris chris 2035532730 Jul  5 00:13 blk0001.dat
-rw------- 1 chris chris  699731968 Jul  5 00:13 blkindex.dat
$ bitcoind getblockcount
187613

and to give an idea of daily growth, here it is around 25 hours later:

$ date
Fri Jul  6 01:33:04 PDT 2012
$ ls -l blk*
-rw------- 1 chris chris 2046730806 Jul  6 01:32 blk0001.dat
-rw------- 1 chris chris  703234048 Jul  6 01:32 blkindex.dat
$ bitcoind getblockcount
187757
Chris Moore
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