Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: The case for moving from a 160 bit to a 256 bit Bitcoin address
by
BurtW
on 01/05/2017, 12:15:20 UTC
There are only 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis.

Therefore the maximum number of Bitcoins addresses that can contain value at any one time is only about 251 and that assumes only one satoshi per address.

At the time the block chain contains 255 transactions it would be somewhere between a petabyte and an exabyte in size.  So a full node would need a multi petabyte drive to store the entire block chain.