Are there any techs/methods applied or going to be applied on the Bitcoin network to reduce the size of blockchain? It is really a burden for person to run a full-node especially on VPS. Or what other coins successfully dealt this storage problem?
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2 Answers
Modern Bitcoin Core nodes don't need to store the whole block chain (although they do need to download it all), which may solve the problem with your VPS. See this answer for more information about block file pruning.
The total amount of information in the block chain can't be reduced without making it impossible for new nodes to validate historic transactions and ensure nobody has violated the Bitcoin Protocol. However, there are proposals for more efficient ways to transmit and store the information currently in the block chain. See this transcript of a talk by Gregory Maxwell for a bit more information; here's a quote:
Pieter [Wuille] and I figured one out that can reduce the size of the entire history of bitcoin to 28%. It's CPU intensive, and it's only based on a per transaction basis, so there are even more optimzations that could be done. If this was used, it could make block storage smaller, it could make transaction smaller, it could make block propagation smaller, but the real effect for users would probably be transaction relay.
answered May 9, 2018 at 9:30
In cases like VPS it seems that the storage on plans rarely increases much despite HDD size increasing nearly ten-fold since the beginning of 2009.
Depending on how you use the node there are several options to reduce storage requirements. Here are a few:
- Enable pruned mode on the node.
- Use an SPV client like Electrum in place of Bitcoin Core.
- Enable inline file compression (if available) i.e. btrfs compression.
