Scalability issues

In a conversation between two individuals on July 27, 2012, one individual mentioned that they were running vintage 2.6.20 Linux on an ancient computer with an 1.8 GHz P3 Celeron processor and had synced the chain in less than two days. The other individual questioned if they were running bitcoin with state-of-the-art encryption features such as sha256 integrity trees and AES-128-XTS/CBC disk encryption. The first individual responded by saying that trying to run advanced encryption on such an old computer was not advisable and they were planning to upgrade their hardware instead of turning off encryption features. They argued that keeping data intact and private was important, regardless of its content. The second individual agreed but questioned why public record needed to be encrypted as well.