[Hexayurt]

Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions.

1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a half.

2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions.

Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they have a complete history.

And these are just the naive approaches. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ for a more sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)

[explorigin]

Thanks for this response. I'm not liking things a little less.

[Hexayurt]

Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.