Fun Fact: The size of the blockchain will keep growing forever

Blockchain is a public ledger, a database for storing transactions.

Full nodes keep a copy of all transactions. They must sync correctly with the majority of nodes for validity. These nodes allow networks to be decentralized and completely peer-to-peer, without a central authority.

Novel as blockchain technology is, the size of the network will keep growing FOREVER.

For context: The Bitcoin size stood at just 8.5 MB in early 2011 before rising parabolically to over 350GB in early June 2021.

Its size will subsequently increase, taking more resources for would-be full node operators—think disk size and terabytes of data for downloading before more hours of syncing.

The more involved and expensive syncing becomes, the more people keep off, and this impacts decentralization. So node distribution is vital for public chains.

Luckily, the development team is aware of these challenges. Some measures to attract full node operators include periodic archiving of old data, data pruning, and sharding—that is, splitting the network into 'shards,' eliminating the need for full nodes to store data transactions genesis.