A glaring problem I've been thinking about lately, and I'm surprised I haven't seen any discussion on it, is the growing size of the block chain.
The transaction ledger grows each day, and because it's permanent, eventually it will get very computationally expensive to move a single coin because it has a huge transaction history built up on it.
Am I missing something here? To me it seems that over time the global block chain will grow in size to the point where it consumes all computing resources thrown at it. Home PC's can't be expected to store multi-gigabyte (or terabyte) block chains just to perform transactions.
Am I completely off-base here?
and hard drive space keeps growing too.
9 years ago, i had a 120GB hard drive
now, i have 1250GB of hard drive space.
storing the block chain should not be a problem for the foreseeable future, though people are working on implementing block pruning and the headers-only client, which would drastically shrink the amount of data one would need simply to use bitcoin.