The community is concerned about the possible slowdown of the network.

According to CoinDance, the current size of full bitcoin blockchain equals 100.18 GB. As of now, there are about 4,500 to 5,000 full bitcoin nodes constantly online.

The news about the blockchain reaching the 100 GB milestone met a mixed reaction on Reddit.

“Will we lose some nodes, which are running on virtual servers (due to more expensive tarif needed),” user ltogo wonders.

Other commenters noted that the key issue is not the size of files but the limited bandwidth capacity for some nodes connecting to the Internet through TOR.

“Its not about storage space its about internet speeds especially over TOR. Small blocksize means nodes can propagate blocks much faster,” wrote user FluxSeer.

Several bitcoin network node holders have reported the declining speed of synchronisation.

“I just sync'd a node and it took two weeks. On an old laptop that I want to make into an always-on node,” says user belcher.

The Bitcoin Core devs have not commented on the problem yet. The Core download page recommends having “enough bandwidth and storage for full blockchain size.” It looks like the page has not been updated for months as it states the blockchain size of 65GB.

Meanwhile, a group of Core developers are working on the next stage of bitcoin scaling solution that includes the long-awaited 2Mb block size increase. The work has been going on for at least a year. Besides scaling and allegedly a more secure way of the hard fork implementation, the proposal promises “lots of useful improvements” including the new Merkle tree algorithm that closes some existing vulnerabilities. Despite the raised maximum block size limit, the coders promise the average and actual block will decrease, which may help the bandwidth issue.

Roman Korizky

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