What is the maximum number of blocks in a blockchain?
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1Why was this question put on hold? It is a valid question for the Ethereum blockchain. – Ismael Sep 23 '17 at 13:44
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@Ismael , thats what I am asking myself. Hate stackoverflow's rules, they treat us as bytes, not as humans – Nulik Sep 23 '17 at 14:48
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Actually, there is no maximum limit on number of blocks, blocks just keep getting added to the end of the chain at an average rate of one every 10 minute this process will not stop even if all Bitcoin (21 million) get mined, because people will need blocks to store their daily transactions.
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1I think there must be a theoretical maximal number of block due to the fact that the field where the number of blocks is indicated has a finite size. I don't argue that we will get to this number before the end of the Earth, but still it is bounded. Moreover, it is Ethereum SE so I'm not sure the bitcoin example is so accurate. – Distic Sep 23 '17 at 9:02
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@Distic In Bitcoin the block number is not stored in the block header (bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#block-headers), so it is effectively not limited. In Ethereum the block number is stored as a scalar (Yellow Paper, Section 4.3 The Block) and scalars are serialized as their smallest big endian representation (Yellowo Paper, Appendix B Recursive Length Prefix), this implies the block numbers are no limited by any bound. – Ismael Sep 23 '17 at 15:04
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Vijesh's answer is correct at the blockchain level. Within smart contracts, block numbers are represented as a 256-bit unsigned integer, so the maximum block number is 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,935. This would take 3,671,743,063,080,802,746,815,416,825,491,118,336,290,905,145,409,708,398,004,109,081,935,347 years to reach at 15 second block times.
This is unlikely to be a problem in practice.
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Even if we had the time, we might not have the energy: pthree.org/2016/06/19/the-physics-of-brute-force – lungj Dec 21 '17 at 16:55
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