I wonder how much space is the blockchain using. Is the space growing linearly with the number of transactions?
I’m not sure how to answer your question, as it’s not very specific.
The Algorand platform is optimized to allow end users running a non-archival node to enjoy the benefits of a small storage footprint. A non-archival node stores only the latest 1000 blocks, and each block is limited to 1MB worth of transaction space.
The long term storage of fully archival nodes is pretty large. But it’s not required for end-user to storage that. It’s being used only as the cryptographic proof for the block-chain.
Is that answers your question ?
Thank you @tsachi. Out of curiosity, what about the full archival nodes? How to model the space used as a function of n. of transactions?
I don’t have these numbers in front of me, so I don’t really have concrete values.
Roughly, running the mainnet for a year was ~120GB. The vast majority of that space is the consumed by the block certificates and not the transactions themselves.
The transactions are encoded in storage in the same way they are over the wire - both are msgpack encoding. The size of a single transaction can vary, but typical transaction is about 256 bytes, and large one get get to 2K bytes.
Keep in mind that with a high-round rate ( i.e. every 4 second ), there are less transactions per block, but the block would still need to be verified in the same way ( hence, the storage cost is roughly fixed per block )