Bitcoin wallet hard drive space

Using a bitcoin client gradually fills up your hard drive

I’m using over 99% of my laptop’s 114GB SSD hard drive, so every GB counts. Recently I tracked down an application that was taking up more and more disk space: bitcoin-qt, the reference bitcoin client software. Bitcoin-qt keeps a local copy of the entire blockchain history, which makes it more secure than clients which rely on the network to be free from attackers, or rely on a remote server to verify the blockchain. However, the blockchain is only getting bigger.

And on my local machine

~ $ du -h .bitcoin/
318M .bitcoin/chainstate
16K .bitcoin/database
48M .bitcoin/blocks/index
16G .bitcoin/blocks
16G .bitcoin/I am sadly aware that scary blog posts about bitcoin only make the bitcoin world less inviting to newcomers. If you want to get started with bitcoin, I recommend making a coinbase.com account, using two-factor auth and a great password, and keeping your bitcoin in their online wallet. Then, you can transfer a small amount, like $1 worth, to a local wallet to experiment with. Remember to back up your local wallets.

Personally, I am installing bitcoin-qt on an older machine that has a magnetic hard drive and plenty of empty space. Then I will transfer my bitcoins off of my SSD machine and delete this local copy of the blockchain.

Source: brooklynoptimist.com June 3, 2014 – 05:34