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This may sound a naively simple question, but...
How big is the blockchian today?
How big is it likely to become in future?
I note that Daedalus' state directory on my machine is currently ~10.3G.
Is it correct then to say that that's the "size of the chain" today?
For the second question, we could hypothesize a number of scenarios, like: 5 million Digital Identities are issued. What impact is that likely to have on storage requirements of Daedalus?
It's hard to tell how the network will grow into the future because of both varying usage and IOHK introducing new chain optimisations etc.. However we can work out the hypothetical maximum growth using the current chain parameters.
Max_Block_Size = 65536 bytes
Blocks_Per_Epoch = ~21000
Epoch_Length = 5 days
So we could say a rough maximum chain size increase over an Epoch is Max_Block_Size * Blocks_Per_Epoch which comes out as 1.4155776 GB per epoch or around 100 GB per year.
I'm only answering about the size for now: on one of the cardano nodes that I just checked some seconds ago
$ du -sh state-node-mainnet
9.4G
I can't say how fast it grows. I just look at it from time to time.
Compared to the size of the Bitcoin ledger, the size of the Cardano blockchain is relatively small as of October 20, 2021. You can see the blockchain size if you look in the Daedalus wallet's folder called ../wallet/chain/immutable.
|-------------------|--------------------|--------------------|
| Network | Blockchain size | Number of blocks |
|-------------------|--------------------|--------------------|
| Cardano | 16 GB | 6,394,340 |
|-------------------|--------------------|--------------------|
| Bitcoin | 421 GB | 705,835 |
|-------------------|--------------------|--------------------|
What the size of the Cardano ledger will be in 5 years period, for example, is very difficult to say. It depends on the number of transactions in each block, the speed of formation of the ledger (we know it is Hydra's patrimony) and the total size of the transaction. Currently, the transaction size should not exceed 16 KB, including metadata.
