Blockchain size is suppose be roughly 523GB but its taking more space on SSD

I’m currently syncing my (apparently unrecommended) Raspberry Pi 4 8GB, 64GB MicroSD, 1TB External SSD Bitcoin Core at the moment which is currently at 95% completion. (For some reason which I haven’t found an explanation yet, it became extremely slow after 90%)

I was curious as to how much space Bitcoin Core is currently taking on my SSD drive and found out it’s currently taking approximately 626.20 GB. I find this pretty mind-boggling because according to the data provided below by blockhain.com, as I’m posting this, the current blockchain size is 523GB. FYI I only installed the Bitcoin Core service and nothing else.
(https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/blocks-size)

During the installation of StartOS, I selected my SSD when it asked me to choose a storage drive, assuming that the StartOS’s main data would be stored on the MicroSD…

Does anyone have a clue as to why a mysterious 103.2GB of space is being used on my SSD?!

1 Like

The main reason why the more recent blocks take more time to process is that it is also validating scripts in the blocks. Every bitcoin core major release a setting called “assumevalid=” is updated to a certain known good block number. All blocks before that are then assumed valid and don’t have their scripts validated. Here’s a more technical explanation: https://github.com/CryptAxe/info/blob/master/AssumeValid.md

The reason why Bitcoin Core is taking up more space than the “blockchain size”, is that it also keeps indexes like the transaction index (txindex=1 setting) and block filters:

root@xxx:/embassy-data/package-data/volumes/bitcoind/data/main# du -h ./* --threshold=100MB
189M    ./blocks/index
554G    ./blocks
7.7G    ./chainstate
9.4G    ./indexes/blockfilter/basic
9.4G    ./indexes/blockfilter
44G     ./indexes/txindex
54G     ./indexes
112M    ./mempool.dat
2 Likes

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I hope people in the future with a similar query find this fruitful!

1 Like