You are showcaseing my point. It processes sliver of the amount of transactions and its already a third the size. If it had the transaction demand that bitcoin does, then only centralized servers would be running a node.
Discussion
Most of the blockchain size of Monero was before tx size was reduced by ~80%
You keep going back to hypotheticals and "ifs" that might not ever exist.
I'm talking about reality today.
Monero takes less resources to run than a Bitcoin node.
~180GB vs ~500GB which is smaller and easier to download?
So how many TerraBites would it be if it was in BTCs position in the market?
XMR would be under government compliance pretty fast because running a node wouldn’t be feasible for the average user
What does storage cost have to do with government compliance? Now you are reaching. If anything it is easier to control Bitcoin because:
1. No privacy = less censorship resistance. You can find and target users more easily and threaten with prison or worse just like the Canadian trucker donation fiasco proved.
2. Mining centralizes on large corporate mining farms = easy targets for governments.
And we are still in your fantasy world where Monero has the same amount of transactions as Bitcoin *today* (it doesnt). If Monero grows to have the same amount of transactions as Bitcoin in the *future* - technology is not static, it also advances and gets better and more affordable for consumers.
Multiple terabytes. But if that slowly happens over 5-10+ years it would be very reasonable. The same way ~180GB is reasonable right now.
10-15 years ago 1 terabyte was expensive and massive amount of storage. Now it fits on a tiny microSD card that you can get for $50 on Amazon. You're discounting Moores law.