Bitcoin and Ethereum camps have always been arguing about nodes and the properties of their respective blockchains. this overwhelming report from BitMEX Research will calm the debate. Surprisingly, they find that the Bitcoin blockchain is still bigger than Ethereum’s. However, this is about to change. BitMEX Research also concludes that size is not the right metric to compare the two chains because “to get useful information about the Ethereum network, you have to do significantly more calculations and generate a lot more data”.
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BitMEX Research attributes why people assume that Ethereum would be bigger because “it doesn’t remember how small Ethereum was a few years ago”. Then they go into the history books:
“From 2015 to 2018, Bitcoin’s blockchain grew faster than Ethereum, then from 2018 to 2020 they seemed to grow in parallel. Finally, from the end of 2020, the growth rate of the Ethereum blockchain continued to accelerate and the growth rate is now far higher than that of Bitcoin. The cumulative blockchain size of Ethereum will soon overtake Bitcoin and accelerate it way beyond that. “
And give us this table:
What exactly do we see in the diagram? BitMEX Research explains:
“In both cases, the total size of the blockchain in the table above for Bitcoin and Ethereum contains all transaction data, this is all the data that you have to download from your colleagues in order to fully synchronize and check the chain. This includes all digital signatures that authorize every transaction. “
BitMEX research on Bitcoin’s blockchain
According to this tweet from Peter Szilagyi, the head state of Ethereum requires 130 GB of data. With Bitcoin, we can compare this to “the UTXO set size, the amount of Bitcoin spending not spent”. That weighs 4.6 GB, which corresponds to “only about 1.2% of the size of the entire Bitcoin blockchain”. With Ethereum, the story is very different. These 130 GB make up “around 43% of the blockchain size, far more than 1.2% for Bitcoin”.
Also consider the following:
“Bitcoin Core supports blockchain pruning, where a node can discard old blockchain data and only keep some very recent transactions and the UTXO rate. This means that you can fully validate the entire Bitcoin blockchain and check the validity of new blocks with significantly less than 10 GB of storage space. “
What about Ethereum’s blockchain?
Let’s get one thing straight, both blockchains are quite different and we’re only comparing them for sports. For example, in Ethereum, a node stores two types of databases, the blockchain and the state. “The status is calculated from the transaction history and essentially includes: all Ethereum account balances, the storage associated with each Ethereum smart contract provided, and account nonces.”
The state is currently as heavy as the blockchain. “With the reduction of the headstand, therefore, only limited circumcision or efficiency gains are possible. The head state will therefore probably continue to grow over time. “
BTC price chart on Bitbay | Source: BTC / USD on TradingView.com
After carefully analyzing the case, BitMEX Research comes to a conclusion:
“The comparison between the blockchain size for Ethereum and Bitcoin is not always particularly relevant. The Bitcoin blockchain is mostly enough to tell you everything you need to know about the Bitcoin network. In contrast, the Ethereum blockchain itself is far from sufficient to say much about the state of Ethereum, you have to calculate and save a lot more data, otherwise you don’t know what many of the transactions are actually doing. ”
Make it what you want.
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It’s important to note that we skipped all of the technical explanations for brevity. We have also left out valuable material that was not relevant to the discussion. We strongly encourage you to read the whole report, it’s fascinating and gives you a clear picture of how thorough the BitMEX research was.
Featured image: Victor Freitas on Unsplash | Charts from TradingView and BitMEX Research
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