Quote from: Klestin on September 05, 2015, 11:11:36 PM

Quote from: RoadTrain on September 05, 2015, 09:54:16 PM

The top three reasons are perfect examples of worst possible assumptions, on which no sound engineering (especially of decentralized consensus-critical payment network) can be based.

Once again, BIP 101 is not the end-all be-all. It's a first stab at the problem, and a reasonable one at that, imo.

But let's take the worst case scenario: technology ceases to improve whatsoever, transaction volume skyrockets enough to fill all blocks 100%, and all the miners (irrationally) choose to jam every block completely full. In that world, a reasonable desktop PC running on a home connection, and with hard drives that today cost about $300 will have zero problems keeping up and storing the data, and operating as full nodes, until at least the year 2023. In that made-up, dystopian apocalyptic future, we would have to (gasp!) consider a fork... eight years from now.

Is it really reasonable to assume zero technology improvements in the next eight years? Of course not.

I don't know what your numbers are based on, but take a look at Bitfury's calculations (Table 2). Currently, in the worst case scenario, my PC could handle 8Mb blocks, but I wouldn't bother running a node that consumes 1MB/s of traffic and eats more than 1GB space a day.