This has a major implication on performance, i.e., it will be quite a bit slower there. In order to reach, what we think is an acceptable level of performance, we need to put some more thinking and engineering effort into getting good-enough performance on such larger subnet.
After watching the demo at the global R&D subnet, I think that upping performance is the right call. Balance queries took 10 seconds and transfers took 30 seconds during the demo. That was with a 13-node subnet. I don’t think that type of latency will be good enough for end users expecting a step change in performance with the IC-BTC integration.