And the topic will keep being discussed until a solution is presented and implemented.

the solution is clear.. there is no problem..

the 1mb block size (per 10 minutes) calculates as a maximum capacity of 52gb a year. so far in the last near on 5 years blockchain has only accumulated 14.5gb of the nearly 260GB (5 years)of possible space.

so this shows that the blocks are not anywhere near getting filled to even be close to the 52gb a year capacity. and even after 10 years IF every block was filled from now on. that is only half a terrabyte of disk space.

now thats 10 years of full to capacity usage.. so chances are the blockchain may be less.

now i want you to cast your mind back to 10 years ago, where ADSL was only just poping up, and 120gb hard drives were concidered extreme..

nowadays internet speeds are 10meg on average and upto 100meg.. as oppose to the 512k-2mb 10 years ago.

so imagine what would be classed as "standard" in the next decade. we would not think half a terrabyte was very much and the download speed would not be a problem for noobs to get hold of the whole blockchain.

so dont worry about the future, the future will look after itself with technology advances

People are discussing and implementing solutions instead of trolling here.

http://utxo.tumblr.com

please read the bitcoin white paper and you will have the exact answer.

One average transaction now cost few cents ( 0.00004096 BTC on Eligius mining pool ). Average transaction size is half a kilobyte. One megabyte cost 0.083 BTC, one TB cost 87960.93 BTC and it is just approximately 52,776,558 USD. Finally if you have 1 billion USD and want to spend it on ruining bitcoin you can spam the network with 19TB of data. This will put it on knees if current clients and current hardware were used. And no matter how big limits will be set. No one else would be able to do any cheap transaction through the week or so. This will ruin the price of bitcoin, this will make it cheaper to spam the network and so on. Who can be interested in it? China's government can. Bill Gates can. BitCoin infrastructure isn't actually resistant to evil actions now.

posting the same question over and over without using search is trolling.

I can't believe how a forum with a noob-prison still has so many noobs running around.

Yeah, apparently.  When I first looked at Bitcoin seriously, waiting for hours for the blockchain to download I looked it up and found how large it was, killed the download as it would eat too much of my monthly bandwidth allowance.  That was 9-10 months ago, and the threads on the subject had the same tone then - not a problem, go away noob.  I wonder how many do and stay away?  So here we are, and the same question is being raised and answered in the same fashion.  

I persevered and found Multibit, which is now the "default" suggested, so that's an improvement and the best short answer to the question.  As a community the way this and other technical issues are addressed is poor.  Its a legitimate concern, along with how it will scale especially once the block size limit has to increase to accommodate widespread use.

I didn't say "no one is looking at it" did I?  Just the reaction is hostile, with a response ranging from "stop talking about it", through "Moore's law will fix it" to "it'll be fixed when we're ready to fix it".  It feels like a dirty little secret no one is supposed to mention.  And not everyone wants to or is capable of getting involved in the deep technical issues.  The response reminds me of the Linux community and how they respond to user's issues, and after a couple of decades there's less that 2% usage on the desktop.  Maybe the two factors are unrelated, but it certainly doesn't help adoption ostracising those not technically minded.

You're absolutely right, some things must be discussed to death in order to find a reasonable solution. You've made me feel bad for my previous flippant answer. In the open source community consensus is the greatest hurdle to jump and occasionally is more difficult to accomplish than the toughest coding problem. Even well respected coders sometimes have a difficult time getting ideas pushed past the collective because everyone picks apart their ideas instead of helping make those ideas workable. Bitcoin currently has a few flaws that have yet to be worked out. Unfortunately, when you tell this community about Bitcoins problems too many times they become vicious parents that are pissed because their beloved child got a "C" grade in school instead of straight "A's.

There is no workable solution presently that has reached a consensus but here are the solutions presented and some arguments for you to view:

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/91954.0  Ultraprune

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/265488.0  MasterCoin might fix it.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/88208.0 Presentation from the Armory Wallet dev.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/159014.0 Pruning is really a discussion about how well Bitcoin "scales" for future widespread use.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/43616.0  https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/100502.0 Thin Clients are a quick fix for frustrated new users.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/87444.0 Certain types of businesses make pruning more necessary.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/145386.msg3985415#msg3985415 My own frustration over this very topic.

As you can see it really has been discussed to death but it obviously needs to be discussed until it's fixed.