Bitcoin daemon consuming too much internet data

Question

I recently started Blockchain and crypto. I started with ethereum and now on bitcoin. Today I run bitcoin daemon and while i was figuring out some other api related stuff related to bitcoin-cli, I lost about 110gb of data in just like 4 or 5 or max 6 hours.

I just have 4gb left for the entire month. My job is to just create a node for bitcoin and check if data can be retreived from those nodes using curl.

I am using ubuntu20 mint. If there is any config or something i can do about it.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I just got the solution, this is happening because I was trying to sync a bitcoin node that will sync around 400GB of data(approx) as mentioned by @David. So the solution to it was to make my bitcoin node, a test node it can be done by either making the testnet=1 or regtest=1. After this my bitcoin.conf file looks like this

rpcuser=user
rpcpassword=password
testnet=1
[test]
rpcbind=127.0.0.1
rpcport=18332

or if you want to use regtest then

rpcuser=user
rpcpassword=Password
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
regtest=1
[regtest]
rpcbind=127.0.0.1
rpcport=18443

Make sure you use only one(either regtest or testnode). More details about options in config file can be found here.

Answer 2

It is not advisable to synch a bitcoin daemon on a node with limited bandwidth. The node has to load the entire history of the blockchain in order to synchronize with it. That's around 400GB or so these days. You can slow it down, but it will take much longer to be functional, likely several months.