I was discussing this in another thread. It's pretty much assumed that Monero's blockchain will be huge if more people start using it and they will not be able to keep it from growing since they have choosen to go the dynamic blocksize route, and it's a tradeoff for the extra privacy technology for the blockchain to be biggger. The question to be asked here is: What's the point, if the blocksize is going to become so big that the nodes will be way too heavy for regular users and more and more node centralization will ensue until only specialized people will be able to run nodes?
I want to get back into Monero, I invested originally back in the day but eventually sold. It seems they are finally making it more user friendly with the GUI. But I still have problems with the scalability problem. Some people complain about Bitcoin's blockchain being too heavy but we already got it figured out with segwit, lightning network etc to scale for the next years. Now my question is, how is Monero going to deal with its blockchain which as far as I remember is a couple times heavier than Bitcoin or grows at a faster rate? Also how fast is Monero nowadays compared to Bitcoin?
I guess for its niche that is not an important but its still good to know how thinks are going to be dealt with in the future.
Yes, blockchain will be bigger, but I dont see many people complaining about BTC blockchain size - it's the block size and subsuquent congestion that is the real issue, and we have that covered with adptive blocksizes, so we will never have to have the debate that is going on with BTC now. At the end of the day its just data storage, and the price paid for XMR privacy is a bigger chain.
Sure, that will likely lead to more node centralisation in the future, but that seems an unavoidable part of this tech.It is clear to me how Bitcoin with a conservative block size that allows people to run nodes + the extras that will come with segwit, confidential transactions, tumblebit, mimblewimble etc, is way more private than XMR with a network that is basically centralized (nodes too big to be spread across the globe, only corporations running the nodes).