/s
The performance of splitting up files and storing them on multiple nodes tends to be very good since you're not as bottlenecked to one node feeding out all of the bytes (think about bitorrent and how fast it is to download a well-seeded file). That said, network egress might become a problem if the node you're seeding content from lives within AWS or another cloud provider. I don't think this egress price penalty exists in any major ISPs that I know of.
The ETH chain was about 500 gigs over the summer when I synced a full node, but it was growing fast. The amount of data stored is monotonically increasing for every full node in the network. You also need fast storage, you can’t use dirt cheap spinning platters. Maybe it won’t grow faster than storage cheapens, but I’m not sure I’d make that bet.
> The amount of data stored is monotonically increasing for every full node in the network
Right-O. Also the archived nodes seemed to be ~6TB in size a year ago. Today I learned!
I added the "/s" to spare people clicking through before realizing it was a joke.
The short of it is that with the modular approach to Blockchain scaling, more nodes will mean more scale. Separating out execution, settlement, and data availability, the blockchain "trillema" is inverted.
The writing is a bit technical but I recommend that of @polynya to understand more.
Compute, on the other hand, seems to have a really bright future with web3 as long as the workload/task is parallelizable (for instance transcoding a video which has been broken up into many HLS segments). This is at least based on how I work it out in my head, but I'd love to have someone school me who might know more!
The more ambitious variants are very mathematically rigorous but axiomatize a wall-clock oracle, as well as in some cases mathematically-interesting but practically absurd assumptions about synchronicity.
Hoff has deployed his private fortune doing (among other, uh, things) serious research on distributed Byzantine consensus.
If they’ve got it nailed down I missed the paper.