Hmm. As I understand, unlike a Distributed Hash Table, each broker/node has to have a copy of the full blockchain*. And the Bitcoin blockchain is 173 gigabytes-ish now, but if it was seriously used as a currency, it would get bigger real fast. (I have no idea how the copies are all kept current. Not my problem.)
522 billion transactions a year translates to 1.4 billion transactions a day.
This is equivalent to 9,722,220 transactions every 10 minutes , which coincides with how often blocks are published to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Assuming transaction sizes stay around the same size, at 250 bytes, this means that every block would hold about 2.4 gigabytes of data .
This transaction volume would generate about 350 gigabytes on the blockchain every day, or 127 terabytes every year.
For lettuce tracking, I guess they could fork the blockchain every year and drop the old moldy records. (Archived, not lost, but not part of the current chain.)
I can see that blockchains are going to be driving the storage and transmission speed technology.
eta: (reads on further in the article) and processor crunching tech, oh yes!
eta2: * for a full node. Lesser nodes can get by with part of it and go fish for rest via a DHT.
