I think FUD is the right term here. As other folks have mentioned, operating a BP only requires a recent slice of the blockchain and an anchor point to a shared history. People don't freak out about this, but Bitcoin clients don't re-investigate the entire history of the blockchain on every transaction, they use a compressed, provable representation of history.
This is an extremely common problem in large scale systems today - the common solution is an Online system that processes data live, and a Warehousing system that stores and analyzes the gobs and gobs of data generated over time.
The analog here is BPs having an online system working on the active "tip" of the chain and an offline system creating new history anchors.