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Watching Netflix in HD is about 3 GB/h. The spam is less than 100 MB per day. So, the bandwidth is as much as watching a few minutes of Netflix per day.
After downloading a block and processing it in memory, we only read the blockchain data when we serve blocks to peers or when we rescan. That means that you can store the ~12 GB UTXO set on SSD, while you write the blockchain data to a HDD without much performance impact. A 2 TB HDD from Seagate or Western Digital is $80 today and will be enough to store the blockchain for another ten years. Also, most uses of full nodes at home are served perfectly fine with a pruned node that takes less than 50 GB of disk storage. So, the cost is a couple cups of coffee per year: negligible. If you live somewhere where that’s a lot of money, the calculus doesn’t change much: you run a node because it solves a problem for you. Either it’s worth it or not.
Besides, I have no clue why people are running nodes on microcomputers like Raspberry Pis. An old laptop is way more performant, costs the same, will use hardly any more power, and even comes with a built-in uninterruptible power supply.
It seems to me that most people who are complaining about the cost to run nodes are not running into a problem they can’t solve, but parroting talking points.
Thanks
I have no idea what the answer to this is, but how do the 2-5% of fees paid by "spam" compare to the extra costs from transmitting and storing all that data?
Obviously, you're right that people either think it's worth running a node or they don't, but if it's more costly to do so than it needs to be, fewer people will do it than otherwise would.