It is my understanding that in distributed networks such as those created using blockchain technology, each peer has a shared ledger of all previous transactions since the inception of the chain. As time progresses on, this ledger will grow in size (assuming further uptake of the technology).
If each peer keeps a copy of the ledger locally to ensure the 'decentralization' of the system, what happens when the ledger file becomes far too large to be considered feasible to store locally on a peer machine? Does the storage of different replications of the ledger rest in the hands of people/organizations that can cope/support with the incessant increase in ledger size?
I can imagine the case that if the ledger becomes too large to store on my local machine, and I can no longer store anything but this data, I'd have to abandon the system or invest in dedicated machinery to store these extremely large files... From MB to GB and beyond!
This post, Blockchains don't scale. Not today, at least. But there’s hope does a pretty good job at describing the scaling problem in blockchain and presenting a few possible solutions.