That graph shows a pretty healthy decrease in price over the last decade. Not exponential, but linear as Gavin's projections have charted.

a 4TB hard drive costs less than 135usd today guys.... have you checked prices? I currently have over 10TB in my desktop alone, space is so cheap.

Additionally, the average user with a 500GB hard-drive in a laptop isn't going to be running a node regardless as they don't even know how to call up their ISP and open port 8333 to begin with . There are only between 6-7k active nodes and most are miners at the moment.

I agree we should increase this amount for better decentralization , but we can do so by buying 5 dollar vps's which have much better bandwidth in the first place so, thus are preferred nodes to be distributing.

People already need a VPS to host their site or ownclowd, or TOR relay ... why not make it a bitcoin node at the same time?