There are a few ways around this, depending on the use. The owner of a wallet only cares about transactions relevant to the wallet. From the beginning, Bitcoin

There are a few ways around this, depending on the use. The owner of a wallet only cares about transactions relevant to the wallet. From the beginning, Bitcoin has had a method called Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) that uses block headers and only those transactions needed for the wallet to work: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#simplified-payment-verification-spv https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#simplified-payment-ve... This is also described in Satoshi's original white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf This takes advantage of the fact that a block header uses the Merkle root for the transaction set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwXCt1qkBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwXCt1qkBU For nodes and miners, efforts to "prune" the block chain have been underway for some time: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Storage https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Storage