I've been wondering what the hardware requirements for running Optimism's infrastructure are relative to just running a Mainnet node. If Optimism can process more transactions than the main chain, does that mean state growth is also much higher? How is Optimism thinking about this problem as it moves to decentralize the sequencer in the future?
There are two solutions in the future: statelessness, and block-producer/verifier asymmetry. Statelessness (and related concepts like state expiry) has been under active research in Ethereum for years, and we've recently started our own contributions with a new stateless Ethereum client [1]
The other part of the solution is to leverage asymmetries between the hardware requirements of block producers and verifiers. TLDR: this lets you have high HW requirements for sequencers, but still secure the network with laptops. Vitalik recently wrote about this; you can read that here [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/ben_chain/status/1488275978983915523?s=2... [2] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html