Scalability issues

The given context describes a testbed consisting of Pentium 4 1.8GHz single core, 2GB RAM, FreeBSD 8, disk with geli aes-128 + zfs sha-256, bitcoin 0.6.3, and Tor proxy. The estimate is made that by the end of the year, Bitcoin will become too powerful for this reasonable class of machines. Currently, it takes a month to build a new blockchain, and even keeping up with incoming blocks is difficult. This machine also has workstation duties, and even without them, it could choke by mid-2013. It is clear that bitcoin has some serious scalability hurdles on the horizon, especially if users expect to independently build, manage, and trust their own blockchain. This information suggests that Bitcoin's growth and future development may require more advanced hardware and technologies.