Key facts:
The weight of the blockchain grows, but the Bitcoin nodes are synchronizing fast.
Bitcoin Core is the best maintained implementation of Bitcoin by its developers.
Synchronizing a Bitcoin node for the first time on your computer with the Bitcoin Core software is 80% faster than with previous versions of this program, thanks to improvements that developers have introduced over the years.
The volume of data that is stored in the Bitcoin blockchain is increasing, which in theory would make the work of a computer or node that wishes to download and manage this data for the first time more difficult.
However, research points to the opposite regarding Bitcoin Core, the most popular software for using Bitcoin: It is becoming more efficient, optimal and fast.
In fact, today, synchronizing a node of this network for the first time takes only 5 hours, which debunks the idea that Bitcoin history takes up to 2 days to download.
Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp noted in a recent article that each version of Bitcoin Core (which you can learn more about in our Cryptopedia) is able to sync and trade Bitcoin history fastereven if the volume of data increases.
His forecast on the improvement of this software in terms of efficiency was encouraging:
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“As of 2022, I feel much more optimistic that engineers can continue to fight against the increased computational resources required to sync a Bitcoin full node.”
Jameson Lopp, Bitcoin developer.
Lopp explained that, over time, each version of Bitcoin Core has received improvements that have allowed it to increase its efficiency, far outperforming other customers Bitcoin (software) that do not receive as much maintenance from their developers.
“If you’ve kept up, you’ll have noticed that Bitcoin Core tends to get faster each year while other lower-maintenance implementations tend to slow down. This is because if you are not constantly improving its performance, it will take longer to process the increasing amount of data added to the blockchain.
Jameson Lopp, Developer.
The developer illustrated with a graph how quickly each version of Bitcoin Core synchronizes the blockchain, where the current version, 0.22, managed to download the blockchain in almost 300 minutes, that is, 5 hours.
At the opposite extreme, the version of Bitcoin Core that took the longest took about 3,500 minutes, which is equivalent to 50 hours approximately. This is the Bitcoin Core 0.8 version, which was released in March 2013, 9 years ago.
Thus, it can be seen from the graph that each version got faster. One of the biggest jumps in sync speed is between version 11 (in green), released in July 2015, and version 12 (in orange), released in February 2016.
Lopp clarifies that there is still much to investigate about the improvements that could have made the software more efficient, especially to clarify why there are improvements in all versions of Bitcoin Core after the SegWit update (Segregated Witness) was implemented.
Bitcoin currently weighs 395GB of memory, according to Blockchain.com, and more than 727,300 blocks have been mined since it came online in 2009.
A Bitcoin node with the Bitcoin Core software would have to download all that information in order to be able to synchronize with the network as it grows and more transactions come in. Thanks to the work of the developers, this is becoming easier.