the top comment on the 2012 one was about someone seriously concerned about the 2.8GB blockchain download to get started, and a debate about the scalability of bitcoin.
since then:
- light clients have been created. no mobile or desktop user worries about blocks, keeping only references to a few prior blocks.
- merchant services which are full nodes use pruned clients, which mean their servers only use 25gb or so. (while the blockchain is 10 times larger)
- compression of transactions have improved, so each tx takes up less space on the blockchain.
- validation time of the blockchain is much faster, even if you have to download the whole thing from scratch
- there is still a large and growing community of actually full nodes that do invest in the appropriate hardware for decentralization.
- and mining full nodes and their pools have fierce competition to keep their constituent miners, continually distributing transaction validation even if the pool operator is just a centralized single full node.
Most of the criticisms seem to be around the -coin and -currency monikers, not noticing those are skeuomorphs.
People get seem that it is an asset, but confuse themselves over its monetary branding instead of what people can and do with it.
Many do then move the goal post to "there is no demand or intrinsic value", which may more easily retain durable consensus with them, even though most of the criticisms elevate this asset class to a standard higher than any individual asset class in existence. But still related to the exchange rate, instead of what people can and do with it.
the top comment on the 2012 one was about someone seriously concerned about the 2.8GB blockchain download to get started, and a debate about the scalability of bitcoin.
since then:
- light clients have been created. no mobile or desktop user worries about blocks, keeping only references to a few prior blocks.
- merchant services which are full nodes use pruned clients, which mean their servers only use 25gb or so. (while the blockchain is 10 times larger)
- compression of transactions have improved, so each tx takes up less space on the blockchain.
- validation time of the blockchain is much faster, even if you have to download the whole thing from scratch
- there is still a large and growing community of actually full nodes that do invest in the appropriate hardware for decentralization.
- and mining full nodes and their pools have fierce competition to keep their constituent miners, continually distributing transaction validation even if the pool operator is just a centralized single full node.