Chronos Crypto recently released a video titled "Heavy Blockchains Are Not Free". That video is available here:

He starts out saying that he's going to argue that a big blockchain is bad for everyone but, even after his examples, he never actually makes the connection as to why big blockchains are bad. He does say is that big blockchains make nodes more expensive to run, and that those costs will be passed on to users, and maybe it's supposed to be obvious at that point that that's what's "bad" about big blockchains. If that is his intent, then I have two responses.

One is that he's are making several assumptions. First he assumes that, as the blockchain gets bigger, the increase in volume won't actually lead to greater profits for those who actually need to run full nodes, in spite of the large storage costs. In that case, there would be no extra costs to pass on. Second he assumes that storage won't get cheaper at a faster rate than the rate at which the blockchain gets larger. (I'm not saying you should necessarily count on decreasing storage costs as a given, but I am pointing out that you need to assume the opposite in order to assume that bigger blockchains will lead to higher costs.)

The second response is that, even if the increased profits from higher volume weren't enough to maintain profits and the costs had to be passed on to the user of the network... that sounds like a perfectly acceptable scenario! One where the market is working exactly as it should. Why exactly that would be so bad is not explained in the video.

The kicker here is that, if you instead limit the growth of the blockchain artificially, the costs for users actually go up! (With a blocksize limit that is below the current martket demand, you have to bid for space to be included in the network.)

The whole premise of the video, that larger blockchains are bad because they lead to higher costs for those who run them, which leads to higher costs for users, makes the assumption that the costs won't be even higher if we don't let the blockchain grow at whatever organic rate for which there is demand. And so far, the artificially limited blockchain (btc) has had significantly higher fees for users than any other blockchain, especially when the chain was operating at capacity.

A final point here is that the appropriate analogy isn't "It now costs more to produce bananas so we'll have to charge more per banana", it's "People are buying more bananas so we need to grow more bananas on more land." But since they know they make money per banana grown, it's worth investing in more land to meet that demand because they'll be making more money in the end, even selling the bananas at the same price .

There's a huge difference between those two analogies. If something actually made each transaction more expensive to process (which would be analogous to more expensive fertilizer), then sure, the costs will be passed on to those who pay the miners to use the network. But there being more transactions is a completely different scenario where the cost to a miner (per transaction) hasn't changed, only the demand for those transactions has.

The only cost from a bigger blockchain that could potentially trickle down, as far as I can tell, is the start up cost of storing the part of the blockchain that has already been mined, since that's storage for which a new miner has not been paid. (That's similar to the start up cost of needing to buy land to get started farming.) And those costs are minuscule compared to the other costs of anyone who actually needs to store the blockchain, like electricity and ASICs.

Until the cost of storing the blockchain is comparable to those costs (which may never happen because of decreasing storage costs), there is no reason to assume it will have any non-negligible "trickle down" effect. And if it ever does, then that's fine! That's the market working, and any attempt at limiting the growth of the blockchain to limit the costs of running a node (for the benefit of users, onto whom those costs would be passed) only leads to higher costs for users .