"It is clear a linear system is not going to work."

Yes, I get that. A system that makes life pleasant and easy for new users, but not so easy that they can run spam bots, with an exponential scale thereafter makes a lot of sense.

"Around a year ago you could run a witness node on 8GB of ram, now we are around 45GB and a 150GB block log file."

Thanks for the report. That is indeed a daunting statistic. One has to think what that means for one year from now, and a decade from now!!??

How is this to be managed? What workarounds are there? Like you suggest, there are always solutions to be found, if we remain levelheaded, and remember to have fun and laugh about it, when it all seems a bit much.

Doubt you've had much sleep, but thanks for being a good witness.