storage – what’s the dimension of knowledge contained in a single bitcoin?

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I need to retailer one bitcoin in my pendrive and the way a lot free house do I have to retailer that info?

TL;DR: 32 bytes.


Bitcoins should not items of information, Bitcoin is a unit of measure.

To retailer any quantity of Bitcoin in a pendrive you simply retailer a private-key on the pendrive. That may be a 256-bit quantity. It’s precisely the identical dimension for 0 Bitcoin, 0.00001 Bitcoin, 1 Bitcoin or for 21,000,000 Bitcoin.

To retailer the total historical past, because the starting of time, of transfers of management of cash denominated in Bitcoin, you want about 300GB and rising. However that is public info, you needn’t retailer it your self as you’ll be able to at all times receive a replica from different Bitcoin nodes. This knowledge is a journal of transactions referred to as the blockchain.

After all, you’ll be able to’t actually level to any explicit place or factor and say Bitcoin are saved there. That is not actually what is going on.


The 32 bytes (256 bits) is the smallest quantity of house you will have. If you wish to symbolize that quantity as printable ASCII or Unicode characters you may want to decide on an encoding scheme like Hex or Base58 and many others which can enhance the storage necessities.

You’ll be able to retailer 21,000,000 Bitcoins within the house wanted to retailer a set of letters and numerals the identical size as this instance:

E9873D79C6D87DC0FB6A5778633389F4453213303DA61F20BD67FC233AA33262

For comfort you’ll almost certainly set up a file system comparable to FAT in your pen-drive. The file system can have overheads and a minimal allocation unit.


1 bitcoin = 100000000 sats 100 sats = 1 bit

These “bits” are a very totally different factor to the 8 bits in a byte.

In December 2017, BIP-176 additionally proposed “Bits” be used as a normal time period for 100 (100) satoshis or 1/1,000,000 (one one-millionth) of a bitcoin.

That is nothing to do with the items of pc storage.

Identical to its nothing to do with the “bits” that horse-riders put into the mouths of horses.

A bit

not 100 Satoshi, and you can not retailer 8 of those in a byte

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