on your computer and how long until lets say a 500 GB computer can no longer sync?
Today a full synched Daedalus v1 instance has loaded 2.05 GB of Blockchain data to your hard disk. As they are stored in 1.4 million small files it depends a bit about your hard disks partition. A standard formated drive on a Windows PC will require around 4.15 GB of effective disk space.
To give you an idea how this changed over time: in the mid of December 2017 this was 0.8 million files. So around +600,000 files and +1GB of net data size in 3 months.
For all of this please always keep in mind: at the moment (Daedalus v1) you don’t run only a “Daedalus wallet” on your computer, but an entire copy of the Cardano-blockchain. This can’t be compared with a future lightweight wallet.
Also the https://cardanoroadmap.com foresee’s a scalable multi-sidechain structure. This means that not all minting nodes (staking pools) have to load, store and run the entire blockchain data.
Hope this helps
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another 3 months later the DB folder contains 2.2 million small files with a total size of 2.2GB, using an effictive space on disk of 5.6GB
Date............... n.files ....... DataSize ......... DiskSize
15.Dec 2017 ......... 800k ........... ?.?GB............. 3.0GB
05.Mar 2018 ........ 1400k ........... 2.0GB ............ 4.1GB
03.Jun 2018 ........ 2200k ........... 2.2GB ............ 5.6GB
Yeah, Charles mentioned in the latest update that actual blockchain only takes “hundreds of megabytes” and not 8 gbs 
So they are working on this too, and should be fixed in 1.3 ~ 1.4
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Assuming, that the average block size, compressed or not, is some hundreds bytes. I would compress the blocks as they, just need to be read initially or during wallet restoration. It does not need any high I/O for normal operation. I will check the blocks (average block size and compression ratio) when I get home after work.
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Some info and discussion on block sizes may be found in this thread 
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Cool thx. That means that a block (max 2MB) can store ~5.5K transactions, and ~488 in the worst case, when all txs have the max 4K size. Means range from 25tps/sec to 275tps/sec.
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