Look at the numbers cellard posted! Do you have a home PC with 32GB spare RAM to dedicate to a Bitcoin node? Can your home connection pass 99.2GB of daily traffic? Thats all with full 8MB blocks; and according to Bitfury, all that hardware buys you a whopping 28tps. Its still 2 orders of magnitude under the throughput of Paypal, and 34 orders of magnitude under that of Visa.
I dont see any figures here on iops; but I can guess qualitatively. Got RAIDed enterprise-class SSDs?
Disk space is the smallest problem with big blocks. Nodes of modest means can prune. But the above table shows that there would be nothing to prune: They wouldnt be able to keep up with the network, or even run without getting hit by the OOM-killer.
(For comparison, the Steem documentation specifies a minimum requirement of 32GB RAM for a Steem node. Most users simply use steemit.com. So decentralized. But it has the magic word, blockchain.)
Well said and if you look at LN you will see it uses hubs to break the work down between nodes as was needed from day one for any system to scale
and they can break the block-chain down in the same way but they are too stupid to see it.
The BC is a linked list so take the headerID and just point that to a list of nodes who have the full block details if you don't hold it yourself
so think about it as storing a reference in to other objects. Distributed system is not what they do best and no one can argue that
I am wrong because we know the wheels are falling of the current BTC block-chain
Few people like me have seen what starts to happen to a database when you push the size too high and the index
becomes too big to hold in memory and that's with spreading the DB over several drives.