Who, where? Please show me one single post on the forums here about somebody complaining about the Satoshi client's resource usage or performance.
Not trying to defend the ScamCoin there, but actually a whopping 1GiB wasted in a not too easily configurable folder/partition is actually a bit of a PITA, not to mention the trashing of the HD when downloading the blockchain or making a large transaction. I've asked several times how this would scale to, say, 100 times the current amount of users, and I have to say I never got any really convincing answer to that...
localhost, you are correct. Most BTC, LTC users (me included) have no need to download those absurdly huge dat files from zero. LTC is not that bad but BTC is massive and it takes forever. Lets not forget, that BTC and LTC are still in their infancy and current users are a really small part of the final number users - if our beloved coins survive.
Transactions done up to today are only the beginning. Are we really going to drag around 2, 3, 4... years of transactions? WHY?
If SLC has figured out, how prune this massive "transaction list", we better copy this or BTC/LTC become useless faster, than any of us wants to imagine.
