50$ is a lot in poor countries and we need people running nodes in all parts of the world, not only North America and Europe.
With a 1Tb hard drive, anyone would be able to run a full node now. Bitcoin has been around 15 years and the total data space it's taking is just above 500gb
I used the 2-4TB to show that what you need to run a full node for many decades to come.
Yeah, but the spammers are increasing more and more.