You can get a 24TB hard drive off Amazon for less than $500. The blockchain is already nearly 1TB - I had to upgrade the drive in my laptop to use it anyway.
I think delaying the problem would have been good, since Bitcoin still isn't even close to hitting the point of being used as an actual currency. But that is a lost battle.
The point is that Lightning is a premature optimization. If people were using Bitcoin to buy coffee so much it congested the network, then it would be a great problem to have. We would be a great shape in terms of adoption. But people are not even ready for that yet. We're like 20 years in the future, and sometimes I think we have to step back and look at today.
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There are so many vectors in which this is wrong.
1. You need to be conservative as possible with changes if you’re trying to create sound money. Moving complexity to second layers makes a lot of sense because modifying core is too risky
2. You would lose all privacy. Having every transaction that can ever happen on an immutable public ledger is just dumb and will eventually fail.
3. Larger blocksizes screws up a lot of networking and mining., and so many other things. It increases IBD and makes it harder to sync with other nodes.
I could go on but this has already been gone over a thousand times
The centralization doesn’t just come from having to purchase more storage space. That’s part of it, sure, but there’s much more to it.
For one thing if the blocks were significantly bigger then it would take much longer to sync then chain and we’d have fewer people willing to wait. Adversarial actors at the ISP level would also be more likely to detect bitcoin traffic and throttle or drop the packets entirely. It also takes more computational resources to verify larger the larger blocks so CPU could become a bottleneck.
