TLDR:
As of today, 21st October 2022, the Bitcoin chain size is 492.8GB. The chain grows every ~10 minutes, as new blocks are added. The average size of new blocks as of today is ~1.2MB.
How do I find the current size?
If you are looking for the current chain size, please visit Clark Moody’s excellent dashboard at https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/. Look for the “Chain Size” under the section Blockchain.
While the dashboard is a convenient way to find the data, by relying on Clark’s website, we are not living up to one of the principles of Bitcoin.
Don’t trust. Verify!
– Bitcoiners everywhere
Let’s fix that ASAP. Assuming you are a Bitcoiner and run your own node, you can find out the chain size yourself by running the following command against your node:
bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo
When I run the command against my myNode instance I get the following result:
Running the same command against Umbrel also works:
How fast is the chain growing?
This lower bound continues to grow everyday as new blocks are added. Considering an average block size of ~1.3MB, the chain grows ~8MB every hour, ~200MB every day or ~70GB per year.
Why does the chain size matter?
Bitcoin’s core value proposition is censorship resistance. Censorship resistance is enabled via decentralization of Bitcoin nodes. As long as there are tens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes running in hundreds of countries, Bitcoin is difficult to censor or stop. Low hardware requirements make Bitcoin nodes accessible to more people. To ensure that people continue to run Bitcoin nodes, we must ensure that Bitcoin node software continue to have low hardware requirements.
The chain size puts a theoretical lower bound on the storage requirements for running a Bitcoin node. As of October 21st 2022, a full Bitcoin needs at least 482GB of disk space to store the full blockchain. Factoring in OS and other application requirements the practical lower bound is closer to 600GB. You can buy a 1TB SSD drive on Amazon $80. Assuming a 70GB/year growth rate, a 1TB SSD can store the growing chain for another 5 years, i.e. until 2027!