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How can I quickly check what is the current size of the monero blockchain in GB?

I want to download the Monero blockchain. But I'm not sure if I have enough free space on my disk. Before I download the monero wallet and start syncing the whole blockchain to my disk, how can I know what is the current size of the blockchain in GB?

Please don't tell me how large the current monero blockchain is now (at the time of writing). I want to know how I can figure out what is the current blockchain size as of now (at the time of reading).

Is there some website (like a blockchain stats explorer) that tells you the current size of the monero blockchain on-disk? Ideally, is there something like this that charts the size of the monero blockchain in GB over-time (eg so we can see how much it's grown month-by-month over the past decade(s)?

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  • I found one website that shows the current size of the Monero blockchain, but it says it's 64G. That's the size it was 3 years ago, so I'm extremely skeptical bitinfocharts.com/monero
    – Michael Altfield
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 17:51

4 Answers 4

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How can I quickly check what is the current size of the monero blockchain in GB? ...

Please don't tell me how large the current monero blockchain is now (at the time of writing). I want to know how I can figure out what is the current blockchain size as of now (at the time of reading).

You can simply call get_info on any publicly available node (e.g. at https://monero.fail/), for which the result includes that node's database/blockchain size (in bytes). Example:

curl -sd '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"0","method":"get_info"}' \
    http://node.monero.net:18081/json_rpc
{
...
    "database_size": 139586437120,
...
  }
}

Note, there are many reasons as to why this will report differently on different nodes, not least because some will be running pruned, for example.

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3

This works for me using bash in linux:

x=$(curl -sd '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"0","method":"get_info"}' http://node.moneroworld.com:18089/json_rpc | grep 'database_size' |  sed -r 's/.*: ([0-9]*)\,.*/\1/g'); y=$((x/1024/1024/1024)); echo -e "\tCurrent uncompressed Monero block chain is: "$y"GB"
Current uncompressed Monero block chain is: 140GB

Substitute sed with gsed on macOS.

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  • 1
    In bash I get ")syntax error: operand expected (error token is ""database_size": 150323855360,
    – Michael Altfield
    Commented Sep 8, 2022 at 17:17
  • This should work on macOS and linux: curl -sd '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"0","method":"get_info"}' http://nemecko:18081/json_rpc | awk '/database_size/ { sub(/,/,"",$2); print $2/1024/1024/1024 " GB"}'
    – A.D.
    Commented Jan 31, 2023 at 20:48
2

tl;dr

Because of pruning and the limited capabilities of the API, it's almost impossible to determine the current size of the Monero blockchain.

I gave-up on trying to run my own node with a local copy of the blockchain, and I just decided to use the Feather Wallet, which met most of my privacy needs.

internet resources

You can see the monthly growth rate of the monero blockchain since April 2014 on localmonero.co's "Blockchain Growth" section

+---------+----------+
| Month   | Size (M) |
+---------+----------+
| 2014-04 | 15.25    |
| 2014-05 | 174.85   |
| 2014-06 | 599.83   |
| 2014-07 | 802.46   |
| 2014-08 | 1030.13  |
| 2014-09 | 1185.65  |
| 2014-10 | 1287.76  |
| 2014-11 | 1371.53  |
| 2014-12 | 1474.86  |
| 2015-01 | 1549.62  |
| 2015-02 | 1621.59  |
| 2015-03 | 1722.08  |
| 2015-04 | 1791.62  |
| 2015-05 | 1857.20  |
| 2015-06 | 1922.23  |
| 2015-07 | 1988.19  |
| 2015-08 | 2055.28  |
| 2015-09 | 2117.14  |
| 2015-10 | 2184.96  |
| 2015-11 | 2240.43  |
| 2015-12 | 2305.43  |
| 2016-01 | 2382.80  |
| 2016-02 | 2452.68  |
| 2016-03 | 2584.14  |
| 2016-04 | 2691.73  |
| 2016-05 | 2770.36  |
| 2016-06 | 2858.08  |
| 2016-07 | 2942.75  |
| 2016-08 | 3079.65  |
| 2016-09 | 3249.86  |
| 2016-10 | 3423.38  |
| 2016-11 | 3572.91  |
| 2016-12 | 3759.68  |
| 2017-01 | 4473.84  |
| 2017-02 | 5504.82  |
| 2017-03 | 6883.35  |
| 2017-04 | 8222.76  |
| 2017-05 | 10269.73 |
| 2017-06 | 12453.46 |
| 2017-07 | 14553.01 |
| 2017-08 | 18365.08 |
| 2017-09 | 20705.24 |
| 2017-10 | 22732.19 |
| 2017-11 | 25274.80 |
| 2017-12 | 28572.24 |
| 2018-01 | 31273.01 |
| 2018-02 | 32970.93 |
| 2018-03 | 34762.09 |
| 2018-04 | 37324.06 |
| 2018-05 | 40179.29 |
| 2018-06 | 42451.55 |
| 2018-07 | 44596.92 |
| 2018-08 | 46625.33 |
| 2018-09 | 48798.78 |
| 2018-10 | 50066.50 |
| 2018-11 | 50688.78 |
| 2018-12 | 51089.53 |
| 2019-01 | 51439.34 |
| 2019-02 | 51709.25 |
| 2019-03 | 52036.94 |
| 2019-04 | 52518.32 |
| 2019-05 | 53389.03 |
| 2019-06 | 54096.73 |
| 2019-07 | 54637.57 |
| 2019-08 | 55211.77 |
| 2019-09 | 55709.73 |
| 2019-10 | 56204.44 |
| 2019-11 | 56778.70 |
| 2019-12 | 57363.47 |
| 2020-01 | 58104.83 |
| 2020-02 | 58741.28 |
| 2020-03 | 59560.46 |
| 2020-04 | 60578.93 |
| 2020-05 | 61684.86 |
| 2020-06 | 62642.85 |
| 2020-07 | 63608.86 |
| 2020-08 | 64714.19 |
| 2020-09 | 65846.84 |
| 2020-10 | 67121.53 |
| 2020-11 | 68294.29 |
| 2020-12 | 69519.75 |
| 2021-01 | 70789.75 |
| 2021-02 | 71886.93 |
| 2021-03 | 73450.93 |
| 2021-04 | 75049.82 |
| 2021-05 | 76565.44 |
| 2021-06 | 77686.56 |
| 2021-07 | 79134.11 |
| 2021-08 | 80871.90 |
| 2021-09 | 82315.42 |
| 2021-10 | 83983.59 |
| 2021-11 | 85858.07 |
| 2021-12 | 87430.51 |
| 2022-01 | 88939.65 |
| 2022-02 | 90230.76 |
| 2022-03 | 91688.47 |
| 2022-04 | 91905.24 |
+---------+----------+

So as of this month, the blockchain size is 91905.24 / 1024 = 89.751210938 GB

source: https://localmonero.co/blocks/stats/blockchain-growth

See also https://monero.stackexchange.com/a/2526/14535

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this is extremely inaccurate

After calculating the blockchain size to be 90G above, I decided to download the monero client with plan on running it on my 128G disk (actually 118G usable). A quick linear extrapolation of the growth over time shows that my disk should be able to fit the monero blockchain until the end of 2024.

So I went ahead and downloaded the monero cli client v0.17.3.0. After weeks of syncing the blockchain, I found the total size on-disk to actually be 129G.

user@host:~$ du -sh /home/user/.bitmonero/lmdb/*
129G    /home/user/.bitmonero/lmdb/data.mdb
4.0K    /home/user/.bitmonero/lmdb/lock.mdb
user@host:~$

That's wayy over the reported size and it will not fit on my disk :'(

Alternatives

After fighting with the monero blockchain for many months, I looked into alternatives to the core monero wallet.

I finally discovered the Feather Wallet. Compared to most crypto thin wallets, Feather is really, really awesome. It privacy-by-design features eliminated my need to keep a copy of the monero blockchain with me.

⚠ Some monero wallets upload your view key to their severs to eliminate the need to store the monero blockchain! This is done, for example, in MyMonero and Edge.

But the Feather Wallet doesn't upload your view key to their servers. It does download the entire blockchain, but it discards (deletes) any blocks not relevant to your balance. As a result, my Feather Wallet cache only requires a few MB per transaction I make.

Also, feather includes its own tor daemon. It fetches all metadata and publishes all transactions through Tor by default. It doesn't download the blockchain through Tor by default (for speed), but that can be changed in the settings.

IMHO, this was the best win for convince without sacrificing privacy.

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  • 1
    See also github.com/monero-project/monero-site/issues/1953
    – Michael Altfield
    Commented Apr 28, 2022 at 11:44
  • I can't comment yet (bummer!), but wanted to add Feather wallet would be great if it would connect! It almost never does. It doesn't appear to continue to attempt connecting either. Connections are just not reliable, otherwise it's great!
    – Thomas Freedman
    Commented Dec 14, 2022 at 4:18
  • Does your connection have packet loss or do you have any other issues connecting to the Tor network?
    – Michael Altfield
    Commented Dec 14, 2022 at 17:13
  • I sometimes use whonix and connections thru it can often be slow. Feather wallet always connects to whonix at it's default port when I check the box to "never start bundled tor". Either way, if I do or don't connect with whonix (letting Feather wallet run tor), it rarely connects long enough to sync, never keeps trying.
    – Thomas Freedman
    Commented Dec 14, 2022 at 17:29
  • This answer/discussion of wallets is off-topic to the question.
    – jtgrassie
    Commented Dec 15, 2022 at 14:07
-1

its over 158gb as of today....

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    OP literally says "Please don't tell me how large the current monero blockchain is now (at the time of writing). I want to know how I can figure out what is the current blockchain size as of now (at the time of reading)."
    – Michael Altfield
    Commented May 18 at 18:35

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