Quote from: matt.collier on July 26, 2011, 11:06:24 PM

Can you say more about compressing the data? How could this be accomplished in a transparent way?

I understand that there is a maximum number of transactions that can be included in a single block. Do we know how much disk space a maxed-out block like this will consume?

You state that 16 gigs should should be good for 2 years worth of block chain data. Is this a wild-ass guess or based on some reasonable assumptions? If the estimate is based on some assumptions, would you please share the data you used in your calculations?

so far bitcoin has been out for around 30 months and has only just reached about 400mb, 500 if you count indexes. thats 2.5 years.

the past 100,000 blocks have an average size of 4244b
the past 50000 7900b
25000 13558b
10000 22871b
5000 24994b
1000 23705b
500 23170b

you can see that it doubles very roughly every 40000-60000 blocks. but this figure could very easily not work depending on bitcoin growth or death. so the average a year from now would be 40000b, so lets just assume from now on the size per block is 40000b,
40000*6*24*365
now double 40000
80000*6*24*365
add
get 6,307,200,000
i don't know if these figures are bits or bytes, but ill assume bytes.
5.87 gigabytes, assuming worst case scenarios. this means i used numbers that would exist at the end of the, at the beginning. so mathematically the numbers can not be higher than this.

again these numbers are probably wrong because of human behavior, my self and others, but it also seems to look like Moore's law a bit, exept the numbers are doubling sooner than every 18 months.

i got the data from block explorer btw