Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains will weigh more than 500 gigabytes in the near future

The blockchain size of the flagship cryptocurrency bitcoin has approached 500 GB for the first time in 14 years. On Saturday, researchers recorded the size of the BTC network at 432 GB. As for the Ethereum blockchain, its size reached 495 GB, overtaking bitcoin.

As of October 15, there were 14,299 available nodes registered on the bitcoin network, which contain a full copy of the blockchain network. Wallets that are nodes are called light clients and use a simplified payment verification scheme. Clients synchronize with the closest validating bitcoin nodes — miners, exchanges, payment companies, and storage facilities.

For comparison, on January 3, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto launched the Bitcoin network, the size of the BTC blockchain was less than a kilobyte (285 bytes). On February 16, 2009, the blockchain size exceeded 1 MB. Currently, this figure is close to 500 GB.

In early October, Jim Blasco, a crypto enthusiast and developer, announced that he had discovered «the official oldest known downloaded version of the Satoshi code.» Blasco found the code, which dates back to before Satoshi Nakamoto published his cryptocurrency concept and made bitcoin public. The previously lost version was found on the open-source software development platform SourceForge, where the Bitcoin project was registered in November 2008.