Storage – Minimum disk space required to run a full node
As far as I know, to run a full node you need to have enough storage space to store the entire blockchain, which is currently around 390GB.
That’s not correct. Bitcoin Core can run in cleanup mode, where it downloads, processes, and verifies all blocks and then discards them, retaining only the UTXO set and the last few hundred blocks.
Some features are unavailable in cleanup mode. Obviously, a pruned node cannot provide full blockchain data to other nodes that are synchronizing, making it a “leech” in some way. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of full nodes yet. do We service the entire chain.
Another feature that is not available is rescan. This is only necessary if you want to take a previous backup of your wallet. In uncluttered mode, the wallet code can sift through all blockchain transactions to find what has been paid (or spent coins on) and find the most up-to-date status. In clean mode this is not possible and all block data must be downloaded again.
But here on official bitcoin.org it mentions that the minimum hard disk to run a full node is 7GB. How is that possible?
To run in clean mode, the UTXO set requires several GB, and this value can of course increase over time, but at a much slower rate than the blockchain itself.
Side question: I have a virtual server with 100GB capacity and I wanted to run a full node. Can I run a full node with 100GB of storage?
Running in clean mode should be perfectly possible.
