Hi, i am new to crypto and i have a question. Is it true, that the blockchain can only grow?
The blockchain of Bitcoin is already 500GB big and the blockchain of litecoin is about 100 GB big. Is there some kind of garbage collection for old parts of the chain?
Thanks in advance.
Pinko
Well I think someday there will be a change that accumulating data is not too smart.
I think the big problem is, that a blockchain cant be changed.
https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/crypto-education/glossary/blockchain-
Technically you are correct that the Blockchain will continue to grow. But this is not a design flaw. For most nodes, large parts of the blockchain can be discarded, as they only really need the latest few thousand blocks + the current utxo set. From this, all clients are able to tell if transactions are valid, which coins belong to which address etc.
Litecoin Core supports a feature like this called parsing. You as a user can set the max amount of data from the blockchain that you’d like the client to store, everything else will be discarded.
Thank you, for the answer! It is true, that the user has no issues with the blockchain, but if you have to store it, as part of the blockchain, you can get a problem to store a giant blob of data, you cant use for something else. Lets pretend the blockchain will get to 1 Terabyte or ten tereabytes. Every tiny little noise gets saved into the blockchain and someone has to store it somewhere. At least 40 to a hundred copies of it.
This is a lot of space and much more traffic in the internet.
There is a point, when it all gets unusable and the blockchain gets abandoned and crashes. The coins get all invalid.
You do not have to have the entire history of the blockchain to run a wallet that retains blockchain data. You can use the option on Bitcoin Core to PRUNE the data down to the most recent, possibly LTC works the same. But there DO have to be copies of the entire history of the blockchain to have a viable blockchain. HISTORY MATTERS.
We don’t need no stinking history, burn those books, wipe out that data, facts don’t matter.
It is not true the blockchain has to grow. If a blockchain never issues a NEW block, it will not grow. When a coin dies it’s blockchain STOPS growing. Hope that clears things up.
There will be ways to shard chains so that they are distributed among many servers. There are blockchains that can be pruned. There is unnecessary data that is optional in some cases.
Blockchains are meant to store data indefinitely so you can see a complete history, so saying that it’s a design flaw is missing the point of a blockchain. That is the nature of it.