Ok. I want to ask a stupid question here. As someone who has been really out of the loop on the technical side of things and I also have really no idea of the politics behind these factions... but I want to ask what is the problem with big blocks exactly.

In terms of space on harddrives I don't see it. A 4 TB HDD is like 70 dollars on sale.

I did some quick math.

Assuming a block created every 10 minutes and is the max size(which is extremely unlikely but lets go with that) 1MB or 2MB or 3MB or 4 MB or 10 MB.

10 years from now here is how much more GB is added to the total size of the blockchain


1mb blocks - 525.6 GB
2mb blocks - 1,051.2GB
3mb blocks - 1,576.8GB
4mb blocks - 2,102.4GB
10mb blocks - 5,256GB

Even with 10 MB blocks starting now and goign to 10 years out there would not be a storage issue, for the average person. The average person(western) can afford to buy a 6 TB or a little higher HDD for like 150 bucks or something, and by the time we are 10 years out a 30 TB drive will be like 100 bucks or cheaper.

Cost of internet? On average most internet companies per month charge like 60 to 100 a month and you get between 250 GB to 1,000 GB a month downloaded before they charge you an extra 10 bucks for another 100 GB.

So even under the 10MB block size on a monthly basis you are only downloading on your node 40 GB per 4 week period. (I note that this number may be higher as others point out).

How about speed of that internet? Of course it can handle it... 10MB = 80 mb(mega bits) and  in terms of speed, so to download 10MB on an average of every 10 minutes your internet speed needs to be at the minimum be able to handle 133 kbps, yes, kilobits per second, so convert to KiloBytes per second by dividing by 8 and you get 16.5 KBPS, DIAL UP IS 56 KBPS.

If you have 80mbps download you can do 600  10MB blocks in 10 minutes.


I honestly have no idea why anyone thinks big blocks are a problem, maybe if we got to 100 MB blocks and it happened in a few years, but that means almost everyone in the world would be using BTC to make 100MBblocks full every 10 minutes every day every week every year...


So what is the issue? Please lay it out for me, I have been away for awhile.  Am I missing something? Maybe poorer people cant afford to host a node is the issue? But are they hosting it now anyways, probably not...

Please note I did edit some things as I realized I did not word some things correctly and some things were exclamatory for no reason. Thank you below for the great responses about the spam attacks, did not consider that. I guess that changes my mind then on what the real solution is, this may have made me more confused than before I posted to be honest.