My example of the $3 Starbucks purchase is not specific to BTC and applies to every distributed immutable ledger technology I've seen. I use Bitcoin because it'

My example of the $3 Starbucks purchase is not specific to BTC and applies to every distributed immutable ledger technology I've seen. I use Bitcoin because it's the most ubiquitous but generally these same statements and data apply to every cryptocurrency (just at different scale). From the Bitcoin node documentation: "It’s common for full nodes on high-speed connections to use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month. Download usage is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional 340 gigabytes the first time you start your node." There are roughly 1 billion credit card transactions per day. There are currently 500k Bitcoin transactions per day.That's 2000x for credit cards alone. Bitcoin transactions are at a more or less all time high and it's still a TINY number. Yet, the full ledger is at least 340GB with 20GB added each month. With simple math (and current tech) if credit cards were Bitcoin the ledger would be 6.8 petabytes. Back to my comment about it only being available to well funded large players eventually... In terms of everything from energy consumption, supply chain, manufacturing resources, raw minerals etc there are roughly 13,000 bitcoin nodes online. That's 13,000 nodes using 340GB of storage each with total storage use at 4.42 petabytes. If there were still only 13,000 nodes at credit card scale the global storage resources alone would be 88.4 exabytes. At 500k transactions/day some estimates put Bitcoin's global energy usage at seven times higher than all of Google. Bitcoin is a mid-size US cities worth of ledger activity while Google gets 3.5 billion searches per day alone. That's not even considering their countless other products - GCP, etc, etc. Blockchain advocates always like to point out the energy consumed by the financial system and that's fair. However, if you think it's absolutely vital that the record of your $3 Starbucks purchase needs to be accessible to your great-great-great grandchildren 13,000 times over I think we're just going to have a fundamental disagreement about that.