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Is all the data related with the transaction of bitcoin stored in blockchain or the data stored somewhere in the cloud and they are referenced from blockchain. I have this confusion because if we are storing all the transaction information on blockchain then it will become heavy with time. How it will get managed at storage level (if the data is in blocks).

The size of each block in bitcoin is 1 MB, is it sufficient to store all the data (of every 10 mins) in the blocks?

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4 Answers 4

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Yes, all data related with transactions is stored on the blockchain.

The second part of the question was, is it sufficient?

At 1 MB per block, and 6 blocks per hour, we get:

  • 6 x 24 hours x 365 days = ~52 GB / year

Using a site with bitcoin statistics, we can check this (beginning of):

  • 2018 = ~150 GB
  • 2019 = ~200 GB
  • 2020 = ~255 GB

Today the Bitcoin blockchain is ~275 GB in size.

So, yes, it is sufficient.

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  • It should be ~52 GB, all the numbers you've posted should be in GB.
    – MCCCS
    May 5, 2020 at 17:18
  • Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
    – bordalix
    May 6, 2020 at 5:42
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The blockchain (at least as far as Bitcoin goes) is a series of transactions, collected in blocks.

This data is stored on each and every full node (pruning aside). There is no cloud based storage as part of the bitcoin network, although third parties host various forms of parsed data in the form of explorers and other such products, some of which may use cloud storage (assuming by "cloud" you are referring to AWS/GCP/similar offerings).

The bitcoin network itself is self sufficient and requires no third party resources. When a new node joins the network, it simply downloads the historical data from other, existing nodes. There is no need for any other form of storage.

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To expand a little on Raghav Sood's answer, Bitcoin miners and many wallets are what is known as full-nodes, they keep a complete copy of the blockchain. However in the original whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, from which Bitcoin came into existence, Nakamoto identified two ways to reduce the amount of data stored by a node

  • "Reclaiming Disk Space" (Pruning)

    Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space.

  • "Simplified Payment verification" (Lightweight wallets)

    It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in

Nakamoto felt that Moore's law and other effects would mean that storage would not become a problem for a very long time.

There is no need to rely on a trusted third-party (cloud or otherwise) to store data.

Wallets also store data locally that is not present in the blockchain. For example: private-keys, indexes, notes attached to transactions etc.

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For each device the user saves the blockchainas long string . If there are transactioncs , there are broadcast mechanism to update the blockchain

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