in the world of bitcoin, archival activity and consensus is mixed up
which leads to some odd ideas about scaling,
like that privacy preserving chains like monero scale worse than bitcoin
if you are new to this kind of thought, reading this twitter thread might help
the state that is necessary to participate in consensus is just about 10 gb currently
even this can be reduced by using authenticated data structures to do membership exclusion proofs
ethereum does something similar to enable transaction verification without the need for the node to have all of the current state available
the archival part that bitcoiners are so obsessed about is relatively boring
it is just file storage in the end
for more general background on the limits of the interesting part, read this:
luckily the actual state is much smaller. In practice there is no fundamental scaling difference between privacy preserving and transparent chains twitter.com/chimpdaiz/status/2119281966243840356