Currently the monero blockchain is about 70 GB as of 2019 May 14. Assuming monero usage rates stay the same, how long would it take to hit 100 GB and 200 GB blockchain size?
Also I read that if monero usage increases the blocks are smaller? I'm just curious to what is the average growth rate after the bulletproofs upgrade since it significantly reduced the block size by 90%.
Looking at https://moneroblocks.info/stats, the current growth rate looks to be about 400 MB per month, average over the past last half year. This is about 5 GB per year. This means reaching 100 GB (+30 GB) in 6 years, and 200 GB (+130 GB) in 26 years. This is assuming no increase nor decrease in usage, nor in software improvements (transactions are likely to get 25% smaller in the next fork).
Monero will support pruning in the coming release. a 70 GB database prunes to about 25 GB. The effect is smaller on current bulletproof transactions than previous Borromean proof based transactions though. I'm not quite clear what the practical growth will be for a pruned blockchain compared to 400 MB, but it should be significantly lower, increasing the times above.
To your last point, blocks do not get smaller with more usage. They will get larger, since they'll have to store more transactions.
The blockchian grows exponentially not linearly. As of today, 2022-09-04, the size is 140GB. Growing by 20GB or more last year. So I expect 200GB might only last 24 more months.
