This is a bit misleading. With 1MB blocks a 2TB drive holds around 40 years. So put that out a century and we're still talking nearly nothing.
Even with 32MB blocks it's not exactly a gigantic commitment, needing a drive every few years.
Having a nice way to checkpoint utxo is good to get people bootstrapped but it's not like block chain size is a serious issue.
Why is storage not 'the problem'?
I am not trying to kick a hornets nest here, I am genuinly trying to understand.
Increasing blocks increases the load on nodes somewhat, but it keeps the system much more peer to peer, as transaction fees won't end up as high.
There's no obvious easy solution, but making the network expensive and congested is certainly not a real solution.
high-performance merkle set implementation http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin-meetup/2017-07-... and https://github.com/bramcohen/MerkleSet
"Making UTXO set growth irrelevant with low-latency delayed TXO commitments" https://petertodd.org/2016/delayed-txo-commitments
"TXO commitments do not need a soft-fork to be useful" https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...
This doesn't solve the whole problem as the UTXO set itself also grows, but I suspect appropriate incentives could manage this problem (fees for increasing UTXO set size and/or bounties for reducing it).
With these problems solved, Bitcoin would theoretically be able to operate indefinitely without issue. Of course many practical scaling problems remain, the most important being the transaction rate cap.