Reducing Bitcoin Full Node Storage Without Consensus Changes

The recent development in Bitcoin's repository, highlighted by a GitHub pull request, introduces significant improvements to the management of blockchain data storage. This update reduces the transaction index database size dramatically from 66 GB to 26 GB. The methodology used for this compression also holds potential for similar application to the txospenderindex, which could further optimize the storage requirements.

Implementing these changes facilitates the use of both the txindex and txospenderindex in conjunction with data pruning techniques. Data pruning is essential as it allows for the removal of superfluous block data and undo logs that inflate the disk usage unnecessarily. For most Bitcoin network users, maintaining a complete history of all blocks is not necessary, which underscores the utility of pruning.

Furthermore, when operating on a pruned node, if a transaction lookup is performed on a block that has been pruned, the system is designed to retrieve the missing block hash. This hash can then be used to fetch the specific block via getblockfrompeer, ensuring that it is re-integrated at the beginning of the block storage. This setup suggests that with around 50 GB of block storage, a user would only need to re-download specific blocks of interest approximately every six months, optimizing both resource use and network efficiency.