My Chia blockchain is 23.1GB in size (db & wallet directories). My last backup is about a week old, and the difference in size comes out to a growth of 207MB per day. That’s almost 74GB per year.
I cannot imagine how much it will grow if the world starts actually using Chia outside of farming.
I know Chia is doing their Bluebox thing to compress the blockchain, but how much compression is realistic?
And how much of a hit will our nodes take while this compression is going on? Will it be a permanent thing to keep size down or a one-time deal?
I ask because am pretty sure I had more skipped signage points last time the Bluebox Timelords were doing their thing (before they stopped due to the memleak). And I have a strong feeling it’s started again, seeing my partial submissions drop consistently in the last few days and being unable to get them back up despite restarts and no errors or stales.
This will have to be addressed, as there is only so much space that it is reasonable to devote to the blockchain. That being said we have all devoted a serious amount of space to plots, which are fundamentally of no inherent value.
At least the blockchain is a ledger of transactions.
Have they thought about placing the blockchain inside the plots?
Is there any way to track the current size of the blockchain with and without bluebox compression? I’ve heard them say the compression is about 2% per day so it should in theory shrink from now on (they will deploy fully in the coming weeks), but I’m not sure how to actually track it.
Harvesting proofs from the blockchain file would be interesting but I don’t see how anyone would get different proofs from the same db file. Unless there’s some kind of black magic (maths) involved.
I symlinked my DBs to one of my external HDDs a while ago and its working fine so far.
In the future, there has to be an built-in option for this.
What could rly dmg the project, is, when new farmers or those without a copy, cannot start farming within a month or so, because of the size, they have to sync first.
Just checked mine is almost exactly 19GB this AM, so the Bluebox compression scheme seems to be working, as that’s 17% less than 23GB. And it’s supposed to continue to shrink.
I thought the same thing at first, but we cannot really put the two in the same category: Plots are farmland: Vast stretches of fixed space, located on slow, possibly read-only, cheap disks. Blockchain is prime NYC real estate: Constantly read and written, intolerant of latency, partially kept in RAM, sync’ed in real-time between millions of nodes, expensive SSD/NVMe.
I apologize for the silly metafores, but you get my point.
Many great posts here. I WILL respond later, but very busy day today…
I had not heard the 2% per day, but I have been watching it every day this week, and it hasn’t shrunk yet at any point. That’s how I came to notice how much it’s actually GROWING, not SHRINKING.
I don’t think there is a way to track it other than compare db file sizes.
No actual shrinkage has occurred yet. Or at least not enough to effectively keep up with the growth.
The 23GB I mentioned is the total size of my db and wallet directories (including SHM and WAL files). My blockchain_v1_mainnet.sqlite itself is 18GB and my blockchain_wallet_v1_mainnet_xxxxxxxxxx.sqlite file is 5.2GB.
Still peanuts compared to other nodes you want to install, try eg a full node of Binance Chain … you will end up as in my case as err … I need a bigger HDD
I usually have per node/blockchain a 500GB HDD (started with 320GB ones) that at this point seems sufficient but looks for some cryptocurrencies that it will go beyond.
Thank you for the tip. I had not tried that. Probably doesn’t work on Windows, but still good to know. I guess you can use Windows folder compression too.
But my larger point is not so much how much of my precious disk space this is consuming, but more that keeping a file of this size (not to mention 1, 3, 5 years from now) synchronized among millions of nodes.
I do believe Chia is working on a new differential blockchain structure, so everybody doesn’t have to have all the same slices of the full blockchain.
Still peanuts compared to other nodes you want to install, try eg a full node of Binance Chain … you will end up as in my case as err … I need a bigger HDD
I did not realize the BTC block chain was that large. I assume they found a way so that everybody doesn’t have to carry and sync that 24/7 on every device that uses BTC.
But also, BTC has 15 years of transactions and extensive use in that 360GB blockchain. The Chia blockchain would be orders of magnitude bigger at that point.
But again, nobody is stupid enough to not realize this, and I believe they are working on improvements.
No worries. Yeah I didn’t realize BTC blockchain was that big. Still, Chia in its current form will get there after 1-2 years if it becomes just moderately successful.
I symlinked mine as well (junction) to get it off my Windows drive. My bigger concern is the one you mention of everybody having to sync it (and keep it sync’ed 24/7) in order to use Chia.
Is having a full blockchain required to farm Chia? Makes sense to me that you’d need a complete copy to validate blocks/transactions, but I don’t really understand why/if the full chain is needed only for farming.
