how large a block can grow? I was looking for a blockchain exchange but I didn't see so I am posting this in Bitcoin group. Apologize if it's too naïve.
I've started to learn about bitcoin and blockchains. I don't understand how the whole network transactions can be assembled into blocks and then all these blocks validated and broadcast. Is that efficient? It's basically a block that grows in size every second. How this large data is going to be processed, stored and broadcasted efficiently? I am sure I'm missing something as this is obvious.
A blockchain is composed of many blocks. The bitcoin blockchain has 660,000+ blocks currently. Bitcoin blocks are limited by the Bitcoin rules to be at most 4KWU (kilo weight units). This is equivalent to 1MB of data per block, however, thanks to the Segwit upgrade, additional information can be stored in each block, making the maximum possible data per block be 4MB. The average block contains ~1.3MB of data.
The blockchain itself keeps growing as more and more blocks are added to it, so yes, storage requirements are rising 1.3MB / 10 minutes. Currently, a computer which stores the entire blockchain (all blocks) plus extra metadata and other indexes, takes up around 330GB - 400 GB.