Everybody who is familiar with the concept of a blockchain network is aware that we require operational nodes to sustain the activity of a blockchain network and to keep records of all transactions performed. It is the nodes which allow for a decentralized trustless system that we all believe is one of the fundamental breakthroughs of blockchain technology. In order to illustrate the hardships of scaling a blockchain, we must calculate all stated factors and observe the output parameters which are based on hard math and have a significant impact on the nodes themselves.

Because Bitcoin is the most popular and valuable blockchain in terms of market capitalization, we can use it as a reference to begin with.

It is easy to conclude that the basic parameter in a blockchain is a transaction between 2 peers. This transaction has several attributes attached to it, such as sender and recipient addresses, time and date, the total amount that was transferred, sender’s signature and any other necessary information. All this determines the size of a transaction in terms of data. This directly or indirectly influences all other scaling requirements.

With Bitcoin, we can observe that the average transaction size is 250 Bytes. For illustrative purposes let’s imagine that a billion people around the world perform an average of 10 transactions per day, each.

That would combine to roughly 2.5 TB of data, which must be stored every day. If we take it a bit further, the total amount needed per year would be a whopping 913 TB, which would have to be maintained by every full node. Furthermore, the network itself would require roughly nine million nodes for it to handle this kind of activity, each of them exchanging and storing around 3 TB of data every single day.

In internet bandwidth terms we are looking at the average requirement of 232 Mbps of download speed and over 460 Gbps of upload speed (assuming high node inter-connectedness), something which is attainable today, but not for the majority of the world. Out of all the factors, the bandwidth requirement, we believe, is the most easily achievable in the near future. The storage requirements, on the other hand, might not be easily attainable outside of corporate, “big data” environments.

With this in mind, it’s really hard to expect an average Joe being able to run their own full blockchain node based on today’s blockchain solutions. To say the least, such blockchain solutions would not be usable on a large scale by the majority of the world’s population.