As more and more Bitcoin transactions are produced, the growth of the Blockchain may well, one day, become a problem for systems which want (need?) to store the whole blockchain.

• Storage usage
• Client startup time
• First-time synchronisation

This answer to "Are there any studies into the size of the blockchain scaling over time?" suggests that Simplified Payment Verification is a good solution, but SPV, as far as I understand it, requires a degree of trust in individual peers that may not be to everyone's taste.

Although I don't really understand the blockchain well enough even to know if this is sensible, the sort of thing that occurs to me might be a mixture of SPV with partial blockchain caching (least frequently used?), where the client keeps a small piece of the blockchain.

Is this really a problem, and is there any work in progress to solve it?

Alternatively, if this isn't a problem, please help me to understand why.

As more and more Bitcoin transactions are produced, the growth of the Blockchain may well, one day, become a problem for systems which want (need?) to store the whole blockchain.

• Storage usage
• Client startup time
• First-time synchronisation

This answer to "Are there any studies into the size of the blockchain scaling over time?" suggests that Simplified Payment Verification is a good solution, but SPV, as far as I understand it, requires a degree of trust in individual peers that may not be to everyone's taste.

Although I don't really understand the blockchain well enough even to know if this is sensible, the sort of thing that occurs to me might be a mixture of SPV with partial blockchain caching (least frequently used?), where the client keeps a small piece of the blockchain.

Is this really a problem, and is there any work in progress to solve it?

Alternatively, if this isn't a problem, please help me to understand why.