Sorry if this was already asked (I did a search for "upgrade" and couldn't find anything).

Why are the forums stuck on version 1 of SMF? SMF v2.x has been out for many years now I think.

Are there plans to update the software?

[EDIT June 18, 2014: To avoid confusion: this thread is now about a solution to the tremendous (and increasing) financial and temporal costs of bringing new nodes online, not disk space.]

EDIT June 18, 2014: To avoid confusion: this thread is now about a solution to the tremendous (and increasing) financial and temporal costs of bringing new nodes online, not disk space.

...to handle the number of transactions that visa handles in 3 months the bitcoin system will require 14 Terabytes of storage space.

To assume that people are going to be willing to buy 14 terabytes of disk space every 3 months (even if it is just $40 in 2020) is a leap.

References:

- http://stormcloudsgathering.com/bitcoin-what-youre-not-being-told
- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Talk:Scalability#Disk_space

So... I don't get it. Why do we need to hold onto the root?

Can't this problem be easily fixed by letting go of the root?

"What about unspent transactions at block 20?" I hear you cry.

Copy whatever data is necessary to move them automatically to the head in a new transaction. Am I missing something?

Edit March 5, 2014: thanks to Realpra for pointing out that this was called the "ledger-solution". See his reply below, also quoted here:

This was debated before, what you call  "rolling root" we called "ledger-solution"/"ledger-block".

Same idea; every say 1 year you would take all the 20 years or older transactions and move their unspent outputs to the latest "ledger block". Amounts in the ledger block would be much like coinbase transactions/miners fees.
Barring minor minor data growth from address fragmentation and perhaps block headers, this puts a quite final limit to the blockchain size.

Another idea (of my own) was "swarm clients" that individually would validate only parts of the blockchain, but as a whole would validate the whole thing - all zero trust etc..
This would allow for almost the smallest devices to participate in block validation forever.

You can google these terms, and I do mean google, the forum search is shite.

The main reason nothing has happened yet is laziness and people too busy getting rich off of Bitcoin - and no you can't lump me in with that group I have been hard at work helping Bitcoin for a while now.

Edit2 March 5, 2014: Something not previously noted here is that bitcoind can (and might already in some ways do) prune its locally stored blockchain, but only after it downloaded the entire thing once. Thus, this issue is more of a problem (I think) for new full-nodes, which currently must download the entire blockchain before they can prune the entire thing.