I wonder. The laptop I'm using to type this on is seven years old. It still runs the most up to date video and photo programs that I ask of it and the spec is only a few % off what you'd buy now, albeit for less.
Consumer computing machinery seems to be becoming smaller and less energy intensive but relatively static in terms of specs.
As ever it's bandwidth that'll be the bitch. My broadband hasn't had any type of upgrade in well over a decade. I'm sure it'll keep up in a few megacities but outside those places progress is going to lag big time.
I do not agree with you. I don't believe that the performance/specification difference is only a few percentage. Performance has been improving with each release, however sometimes by only a small margin.
I'm disregarding laptops in the comparison; Desktop side: Let's assume that someone made a desktop PC with the best available CPU at that time, which would be the Intel® Core i7-965 Extreme Edition. We can easily compare that with the currently best CPU in the Extreme Edition lineup and that would be the Intel Core i7 5960X.
Comparison , here are some examples:
More than 3.2x better geekbench (64-bit) score
Around 2.8x better PassMark score
If you compare GPU performance it is going to range from a 10 to 20x increase in terms of performance.
Okay let's get back on track. Unless we actually have quite better hardware in 20 years time, this might become a problem. We might need a heavy pruning feature.
If we assume that all of the blocks will be almost full, we would have:
7 GB x 6 blocks per hour x 24 hours = 1008 GB per day.