Blockchain over 36GB and causing disk space issues I want to install the bitcoind daemon on a computer with relatively little free space (about 35GB available). I thought that the blockchain was some 20 GB in size and figured that would be no problem, but I'm running into disk space issues. What I did was:


First I tried the torrent file to bootstrap the blockchain. I downloaded the whole dat file and then tried importing, but on importing it I ran into disk issues. About half of it was imported before the disk was full. 
I then removed the bootstrap file and let bitcoind load the blockchain from peers. I seems that it did use the half-imported bootstrap file so the first bit was quite fast.
However, I now have 36GB in the blocks directory, and my drive is full. Still not all is downloaded! 


My question is: 


Is the blockchain really this big?
Are there any files I could remove, given my particular way of going about this?


I have a blk00001-00253, and rev00001-rev00253 in my blocks directory. Can I remove those rev files perhaps?
Depends what you want to do. Remember, to use bitcoin you don't necessarily need a full-node. You can use many of the lightweight clients that exist out there which rely on Simplified Payment Verification (SPV). But if you want to be a full node (perhaps you're mining or you want to verify transactions yourself), then you need to download the entire blockchain which is almost 35GB large: https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size