I don't think so. That also requires a faster cycling of transactions than the current 10 minute round. But yes, obv a larger number of transactions can fit into the block so throughput will increase.

> 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have)

1) I don't know if you understand who "consumers" are. 30 TB is far, faaaaaar away from what a normal consumer has. Most of us have a laptop at most and that limits us to 1 TB storage. I personally have a lot of cloud storage, but I'm not the average consumer. I'm highly tech savvy compared to the normal person. So go out and talk to people not in tech and see what their tech specs look like. If they can't match up to you, they still need to be able to process transactions.

2) I didn't say it doesn't need a 30TB blockchain. You're completely misunderstanding my point. I'm saying your glib observation of "oh it's 300GB now, it can scale up to 3TB if it's bigger" is highly ill informed. If you push it only 1 order of magnitude, you're going from 3TB to 30TB and it becomes untenable. Now instead if it was 10KB and scaled to 10MB, it obv makes no difference even with 3 orders of magnitude.

3) You're also not understanding the larger picture. If all transactions in history have to be stored in the blockchain, it requires scaling to become less than linear (or at max, linear) to keep up with consumer storage expectations. It doesn't matter what the size of the blockchain is now (as long as it's within say 1TB that the average consumer can access). It matters how big it gets when there are billions of transactions flowing through it every day. So by that account, even 250GB is a very big number because once we hit billions of transactions, unless the relationship is inverse exponential, we'll breach limits long before touching that point.

> You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist

The problem that won't exist of billions of transactions passing through the blockchain? Possibly if we had off chain solutions, yes. Which we do in very early stages. If not, the problem is very very real.

Why does it have to fit on a laptop? Only miners influence which tx get into a block, not people on laptops.

>The problem that won't exist of billions of transactions?

Visa does 1 trillion tx/yr. Bitcoin tx is ~500 bytes That's just 500 TB/year. Miners with today's hardware can store that easily. A pruned observer node could run with just a few hundred dollars of hard drives even at Visa scale!

The bottom line is that Satoshi and others thought about this and no one saw it as a problem until Blockstream and other VC funded startups began pushing sidechains that they could profit from.