Bitcoin (BTC) node synchronization would be incommunicable if it were not for the improvements that have been fabricated to the software, according to the research arm of crypto substitution BitMex.

BitMex Research measured the Initial Cake Download (IBD) times of Bitcoin Cadre software releases from 2022 to 2022 needed to download the blockchain and verify it and shared their conclusions in a web log post published on Nov. 29.

The research team claims that the older version of the Bitcoin Core software may be impossible to synchronize now and that the scalability improvements fabricated to the software are essential to the operation of the network:

"Older versions of Bitcoin struggled to get past the pickup in transaction volume which occurred in the 2022 to 2022 period. Therefore nosotros conclude that without the software enhancements, an initial synchronization today could be almost impossible."

Bitcoin initial block download time in days — an average of three attempts

Bitcoin initial block download time in days — an boilerplate of three attempts. Source: BitMex

The team also obtained versions of Bitcoin Core prior to 0.8.6, just those versions could non synchronize past the 2022-2016 menses. The team as well tried to run quondam software on considerably powerful hardware but to no avail. The researchers noted:

"We so even tried running Bitcoin Core 0.7.0 on our brand new local car, with 64 GB of RAM and 8 Intel i9 processors, nonetheless, the node was still unable to become by 2022. [...] The big reductions in IBD times and the inability of former nodes to fully synchronize point that if it were not for these scalability enhancements, by now Bitcoin would be essentially expressionless, even if users had the highest specification hardware available."

The rate of comeback slowed down

The about pregnant improvement in speed took place after Bitcoin Core version 0.12.0 when developers adopted a signature verification library purpose-built for Bitcoin in place of a standard one.

This detail version of the node software also does not validate the signatures of Segregated Witness (SegWit) transactions since information technology did not support them, which farther cuts sync times.

Bitcoin initial block download time in days

Bitcoin initial block download fourth dimension in days. Source BitMex

Interestingly, until Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 the scalability improvements seemingly kept the pace and maintained the sync times in a relatively narrow time range. Subsequently those initial releases, the popularity of the Bitcoin network and its size started to grow much faster than scalability improvements made to the software, resulting in longer sync times. The BitMex research team concludes:

"The data also shows that technological innovation is unlikely to proceed up with the growing blockchain going forward and that IBD times volition increase."

Much of the focus in Bitcoin development was devoted to preserving decentralization, which also means keeping the hardware specifications needed to run a node of the network equally modest as possible.

In social club to lower requirements, developers also kept a relatively low 4-megabyte block weight limit (with SegWit) and a relatively loftier block time of ten minutes, which has kept the growth of the blockchain's size in bank check.

Currently, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain is 293.37GB, with an boilerplate block size of just over 1 megabyte. There are as well over 9.5K reachable nodes around the world today, according to monitoring resource Bitnodes.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, the latest Bitcoin Core software update, 0.19.0.1, further improves on scalability by using Bech32 that natively supports SegWit transactions.