The real issue I have with these large blockchains is the processing power required for verification. A modern laptop cannot even handle Bitcoin today. I’ve never let my surface book 2 try to complete it, but it looks like it would take at least 2 weeks.
So, I recently did a test on an unused server I have at work - Xeon 16 core and 32gb ram on a fiber connection. Gave the Bitcoin program 16gb ram and it still took a day to download the blockchain.
The core wallet is going to become unusable for the average person in the next 10 years. Pools will have to store their wallets on huge instances in AWS and even that will have a limit.
What happens 50 years from now? 100? You might need 10s of thousands of capital investment to participate in network verification. That doesn’t seem like a good future proof design to me.
