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.
Serious question as a 'western world citizen'. How do developing countries use the Internet nowadays? Do they have big hubs and data centers like in the west? Or do they just make use of the Internet as it is hosted in the more developed countries?
Without taking a position in the debate, I can't judge it well enough, it seems like sending and receiving a few kilobytes is plenty for making a transaction.
Typically there are no big hubs or data centers, except in some cases where it makes sense due to a country being a hub for other nearby countries, so serving data regionally makes sense instead of connecting to Europe, the US, etc.
The reason is that developing countries can't get competitive rates for their connectivity. Cost per gbps is much higher than the west due to very low economies of scale. And that's also why some ISPs can give you, say, 100mbps connections and then tell you that you can't really use more than a few GBs per month for downloading (but you can use more for local sites, local ftp, local P2P use, etc - because that is traffic which at a national level is like an intranet and you are not paying Verizon or Level 3 to "feed you").
The few kilobytes indeed aren't a problem. Running a full node or syncing a blockchain that is, say, 100-200-500 GB or 2 TB will be prohibitive in cases where capping is an issue.
Not having cheap access to technology & bandwidth is a major contributing factor for this situation:
https://bitnodes.21.co/