We've been over and over this. There's no reason why the blockchain has to be small.
It is definitely destined to become big. However, the blockchain should not be treated like a dumpster.
Not when broadband is ubiquitous. Not when 1TB hard drives cost less than a carton of smokes. My XTnode cost me $118 bucks. The cost is trivial, and even if it becomes less trivial, nodes will still be run because those of us with an incentive to keep the network operating smoothly will do so.
It depends on the scaling parameters.
Someday a bitcoin node may be the size of a google datacenter. So what?
It's not unlikely that it will happen but at that point the centralization factor will have gone up ...a lot.
You don't seem to understand certain things, like why aren't blocks filling up now when fees are either zero or near zero.
It's not me crying doom for 1MB blocksize and fee increases...
The risk of orphaned blocks is real. it happens all the time. It's because miners can chose how big to make their blocks now by deciding which transactions to include. Miners, smart miners, most miners don't care about what percentage of their compensation comes from block reward and which part comes from fees. They only care about ROI, like any sane businessman. If they can make more money from bigger blocks, they'll do it. If they can make more money from smaller blocks, they'll do that.
Not all miners behave the same way.
You want to keeps blocks small to make stress tests less likely. Why? Stress tests are a good thing. They are important for determining the safety and security of the network.
There's not much that a stress test can reveal that a script on a virtual testnet can't. And the second one won't have a lasting imprint on the blockchain.
I mean you know beforehand what will happen. If you start spamming, the blockchain size will start increasing, free txs will slow down a lot in their processing while those txs with fees will go through quickly.
Actually I'm concerned with far bigger attack vector implementations by "the powers that be". And the thing is, these guys are more dangerous than the average script kiddie because they also have money to pay for the tx fees. In that scenario you are fucked because they can do both bloating + tx crowding over the rest of the users, by paying more fees and rendering the network unusable. So you need much better solutions than increasing the blocksize (which will happen when it is necessary).
A half million transaction/day isn't enough for bitcoin to be anything more than a hobby network.
How many txs do you want it to handle per day?
Nobody can build a business model around Bitcoin now without knowing what the future capacity will be. People need to plan.
All the bitcoin developers want Bitcoin to scale and there is 100% consensus on that. This practically guarantees it will happen, despite their differences on whether the blocksize should be raised now, raised temporarily (kicking the can), raised later, have something else done, etc etc.
The precise numbers on how scaling will go down on 5 years, 10 years, 20 years are pretty much unknown but that will not stop investments or businesses.
