I wanted to ask again here, directly to Bitcoin techies: How can BTC survive 100 years if no one can download the massive blockchain? Most residential IPs enforce a 1TB/mo cap. Much of the internet is also on slow connections (Australia).
The BTC whitepaper is surprisingly hand wavey on this one subject, and the more I think about it, the more it seems like an Achilles' heel.
Can we eventually reboot BTC back to the genesis block, but with all current BTC pre-mined and allocated to current holders? Kind of like a manual GC, or hard reset back to initial commit.
But it doesn't seem that simple. Millions of people have certain quantities of BTC, and even tiny ones add up. You have to track that data somewhere. It doesn't seem possible to encode the whole state of the world into a 1MB genesis block.
So the question becomes, at what point to we reboot, how, and by what mechanism can we achieve community consensus?
This is combined with the fact that BTC is deflationary, so eventually miners will charge nothing but tx fees. No more block reward = the TX fees must be at least as high as the current block reward. That is a staggering cost since a 1MB block can only encode a couple thousand tx.
That leads to the difficulty death spiral: difficulty re adjusts every 2016 blocks. Two weeks when every block mines at ten minutes. But if miners leave en masse, then suddenly it will take a very long time to mine blocks. It could be months before the difficulty readjusts down.
This must sound identical to all the previous BTC naysayers, but believe me when I say I believe this can work. I'm trying to discuss the technical merits and set aside the question of whether it will fail.