No. Let’s take a look at the bandwidth usage of a Bitcoin node. You can find some stats

here

. The combined upload and download bandwidth for that Bitcoin node is about 8.8 Mbps. If I compare that to my home internet with speeds of about 100 Mbps I can see I’ve got a fair amount of excess bandwidth. But let’s dig into that 8.8 Mbps number a bit more. It turns out that about 97.5% of the bandwidth being used is unrelated to processing transactions and blocks. Instead all of that bandwidth is being used to upload blocks to nodes that are bootstrapping or coming back from an absence. Another opportunity for some massive optimization. I will talk about how we can optimize that in the next section but for now I just want to point out that if you run your node in “pruned” mode, you will not upload the chain to other peers and will reduce your bandwidth usage to just 220 kBps. If we multiply 220 kBps by 100 to get a rough estimate of our bandwidth usage at 100MB blocks we get 22 Mbps. Plenty to run a blockchain with 100MB blocks and still stream Netflix on multiple TVs at the same time. I am aware that

some

, though certainly not all, ISPs have monthly data caps. But people with those ISP would just have to suck it up and upgrade to an unlimited plan if they want to run a home node. And I suspect in a few years all plans will be unlimited.

But Wont Blockchain Storage Be Astronomical?