I just joined Quora and answered a question about Steem

@theycallmedan has some interesting initiatives which you might want to give a try.

Following such an initiative, I joined Quora and answered a question about Steem.

I picked the question because no one answered it before, not because it was the most appealing.

Here's the question then my answer (edited to fix the errors discovered thanks to @crokkon), published on Steem for immutability.

How many bytes of data are written to the Steem blockchain in a day?

Short answer: at most 1,887,436,800 bytes (i.e. approx. 1.75 GB), but otherwise no way to be sure.

Long answer:

Edited: You can't really know how many bytes will be written in the Steem blockchain in a day, as this depends on the size of the operations included in each block, and blocks are not of fixed size. What we can calculate with exactitude is the maximum amount of bytes Steem blockchain can store in a day.

To calculate what is the maximum number of bytes which can be stored on the Steem blockchain in a day, you need two elements:

• the frequency at which new blocks are produced (3 seconds on Steem)
• the maximum block size (65536 bytes on Steem)

The rest is simple math to find out what is the max number of bytes that can be stored in a day: (60 / 3) * 60 * 24 * 65536 = 1,887,436,800.

The question may imply that the Steem blockchain is growing too fast and it will have scalability issues in the future.

Well, if that was the reason behind the question, let’s investigate deeper.

Scalability issues have always been a top priority on Steem.

At the beginning of 2019, MIRA was created by Steemit, Inc. to drastically reduce the need for RAM by Steem nodes (“by 50% and nVME usage by 100%”). RAM was by far the most expensive resource needed for Steem nodes.

But if there are concerns about the size of the blockchain as a whole, let’s see.

I may not calculate this precisely, but to my logic the size of the blockchain is given by the head block number times the size of the block.

Edit: Since the block size is variable, if we calculate based on the above formula, we will get something like below.

The head block number on Steem was 38855324 when I checked. The maximum block size obviously still 65536. That would make the size of the Steem blockchain 2,546,422,513,664 bytes in 3.5 years. That is roughly 2.31 TB.

Edit: In reality, if we check the block_log, we will see that the size of the Steem blockchain currently is only 236 GB.

Remember that 236GB records all the activity on Steem over a period of more than 3.5 years.

I just checked, because I didn’t know, what is the largest storage capacity currently available. It looks like it’s in the PB range already. Now that is impressive!

The current Steem blockchain size is only about a tenth of a thousand of the capacity of those largest storage units. And technology will only evolve as human kind needs to store more and more information.

So, apparently this won’t be a concern for a good while (years at least, I’d say), even if Steem user base grows rapidly over the next period.