How does the blockchain store a record of everything without being so large as to require scientific notation to denote it's size?
It uses metric to denote its size instead.
Current size is approximately 9 Gigabytes in size.
That is:
7.73 X 10
10 bits in size.
If it grows to be more than
8.796 X 10
12 bits
We'll just start talking about how many Terabytes it is.