A while ago I was sitting in front of a block explorer seeing the transactions as they happened in real time, in USD terms... there were many 0.03, 0.07$ transactions etc. This is bullshit.
Cry me a river. What is the line between not-bullshit and bullshit?
Bullshit = not understanding the value of the blockchain and polluting it with dust and spam. But, IMO, miners carry a large responsibility for allowing the processing of such transactions which is not in anyone's long-term interest.
Do you personally run a full node?
Sort of.
If you do not personally run a node, WTF do you care about number of transactions? If you do, then why are you so damned cheap to spend another $USD 10 on HDD space, and another $USD 0.50/mo on bandwidth - especially as you're so incensed about small-value transactions?
The bigger the blockchain, the more unusable and more centralized it becomes. The blockchain should grow to the degree that it has to (=legitimate transactions) and not a kilobyte more. Anything different is inefficient.
The blockchain is a valuable resource. If you treat it like a dumpster you are devaluing BTC.Economic considerations should also be given for developing countries where bandwidth costs are high, as are imported technological goods like hard disks, ram and high end CPUs/mobos. The western world doesn't really understand the problem. Then again it doesn't even understand the value of BTC compared to soft currencies either. It came as a surprise to many to read how good BTC is performing against various global currencies. We are so fixated in dollar terms that we cannot fathom that, in some other country, BTC is actually higher than its ever been. Things that we take for granted (stable currencies, access to cheap IT stuff, access to cheap bandwidth) aren't really granted all over the planet - and especially there where bitcoin is needed most.