Will a 1TB Drive Survive the Growing Firo Blockchain?

General
1

Hey Firo community!

I’m trying to figure out how long a 1TB drive will be sufficient for storing the entire Firo blockchain. It’s a valid concern for anyone running a full node, especially as the chain grows. I wanted to share my initial thoughts, some research I’ve done, and get your valuable input.

First off, the current blockchain size is surprisingly small, making this an ideal time for new users to join the Firo network and run a full node. It’s a low barrier to entry right now!

Historical Growth and Pruning

From my research, it looks like the Firo blockchain grew to around +60 GB in size between 2016 and 2021. That’s a significant amount of growth over those years but not as much as other chains.

The good news is that Firo core does support pruning! This is a fantastic feature that allows you to limit the amount of blockchain data you store, which can significantly reduce storage requirements. So that is something else to take in mind for estimating how long 1TB drive would last.

MTP stripping was introduced in 2021

This brought the block size down from 60+ GB to under 4 GB

Currently the size is 8.8 GB in size so punning can bring it down even smaller if user needs be.

Recent Growth Rate

What I’m really trying to nail down is how much has the Firo blockchain grown over the past year? If anyone has accurate data on this, please share. Knowing the recent growth rate is crucial for estimating how long a 1TB drive will last.

Calculating 1TB Drive Longevity

My goal is to calculate a reasonable estimate of how long a 1TB drive will be sufficient for storing the Firo blockchain, especially if I’m not using pruning. Any insights or data you can provide on the recent growth rate would be a huge help!

My current estimate is it would roughly last 15 years if the chain grows around 50GB a year.

Spam Attack Vulnerability? (A Separate Concern)

On a slightly different note, I was reading about how both Piratechain and Zcash blockchains underwent spamming attacks in the past, which dramatically increased their chain sizes.

Has this been something the Firo developers have considered? Is the design of Firo resistant to this type of attack? I’m curious to know if there are any built-in mechanisms to deter or mitigate potential spamming attacks that could artificially inflate the blockchain size. I might start a separate thread to discuss this in more detail, but I wanted to raise the question here as well.

I’m looking forward to your replies.

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So I digged into the Insight API and I’m not sure the best route to calculate the chain size growth this way and I didn’t really want to download the whole chain from the core wallet to get the size growth.

The endpoints I was looking at were these, but this is making me feel like this is not the best route to go even if this is the right way?

Current block height
explorer.firo.org/insight-api-zcoin/sync

Jan 1st 2025
explorer.firo.org/insight-api-zcoin/blocks?&blockDate=2025-01-01

June 30th 2025 (current date)
explorer.firo.org/insight-api-zcoin/blocks?&blockDate=2025-06-30

I’m very interested in this as it would be great insight to monitor the metrics of the chain size grown over time.

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  • Example of Spam Attacks

    • ARRR and ZEC
https://old.reddit.com/r/PirateChain/comments/13xk9zy/piratechain_under_attack/

https://www.theblock.co/post/175259/someone-is-clogging-up-the-zcash-blockchain-with-a-spam-attack

https://protos.com/zcash-chain-triples-in-size-thanks-to-10-a-day-spam-attack/
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The blockchain is currently 8.8 GB in size. Size may fluctuate depending on which indexes were enabled as well as if the daemon is a masternode.

We introduced MTP stripping back in 2021. This brought the blockchain size down to 4GB (then).

1 Like
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Thanks I will reference that in my post. Would you say downloading the blockchain with firod would be best bet since Insight API is limited and looks like it wouldn’t help?

I would like to automate this analysis of block size growth over specific dates. Let me be clear though, this is strictly to get an idea of how long a 1TB drive would last. By the looks of it I would say a very long time which equals more decentralization and more empowerment to users running full nodes. Not only that it would be good viewpoint for the firo team to better see the growth of the network and usage as indicative of new users and adoption.

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I would recommend downloading the blockchain directly.