On the 19th of September, Blockchain.com reported that the Bitcoin’s blockchain data size hit 300 gigabytes, a new record milestone for the network. The new milestone represents the total number of transactions stored on the Bitcoin blockchain over its ten years of existence. As more transactions are initiated and stored on the network, the Bitcoin blockchain size is expected to increase further.
Over the last few years, the Bitcoin blockchain has been growing significantly. There was an increase in the number of blockchain users in 2016, pushing the BTC blockchain size to 54 gigabytes. Today, the BTC blockchain grows at about 58 gigabytes a year.
In addition, the introduction of the scaling solution, SegWit, doubled the size expansion of the Bitcoin blockchain to two megabytes.
A sizable amount of the recorded 300 gigabytes, is unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). The UTXO is formed from the remainder of the wallet sent back after sending out BTC and currently takes up to 4 gigabytes of the blockchain size.
According to Utreexo developer Calvin Kim, the UTXOs could become a scalability problem in the future. To solve this problem, Utreexo is working towards compressing the unspent transactions into less than a kilobyte.
“Utreexo is a hash based accumulator, which allows unspent outputs to be compressed into a smaller size. There is no loss of security; instead, the burden of keeping track of funds is shifted to the owner of those funds.”
To support Utreexo’s project, BitMEX’s parent company, the 100x Group, recently awarded Utreexo a year grant of $40,000.
Image Credits: Pixabay
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