Quote from: n0nce on April 07, 2022, 02:21:33 PM

I, for one, am very happy that we can still run Bitcoin on $50 worth of hardware after such a long time. And I'm still convinced this is what really sets Bitcoin apart; true decentralization.
Sorry for the off-topic ramble, but I figured this historic little piece of information does fit in this topic and maybe it will motivate someone to build their own $50 node over the weekend!

Yeah, although its not for everyone. As most of us now by now, not many people want true decentralisation since it usually comes with a cost. By that I mean, when we ask the majority of the population they probably aren't going to be willing to pay for something just to use their own money, they would rather have third parties which handle that for them. Obviously, we don't need everyone to be running a node.

As for the costs, to be honest except for rising electricity costs I would like to think the total cost will continue to go down. The only issue that could become a problem is the storage, so far we've been pretty much following Moore's law with our increases in hardware capability, although I've definitely noticed the last year or so that most hardware is now becoming too powerful for our means, and therefore we won't use it a lot. Obviously, hard drives are a little different to CPU's, and graphics cards. Although, I do think that the general consumer won't be requiring much more than four terabyte (TB) hard drives in the future. Hell, I probably have over 50TB among all the hard drives I've collected over the years, but I don't use half of them. My main machine only has a 1TB hard drive in it, and that's no where near full.

So, storage is probably the biggest concern for Bitcoin self hosted nodes, at least full nodes is that the storage requirements might outpace what general consumers usually have or require. I don't think it'll be an issue for the capability we have in manufacturing larger hard drives, but it'll be what is available to the general consumer at a decent price, which the lesser demand probably means a lot of people could be out priced. Thoughts?