If 2TB at $200 is the binding constraint, the cost-per-byte trajectory is actually working in your favor over a 5–10 year horizon — $/TB has been dropping ~12-15%/yr historically and 4TB NVMe is already <$300 in 2026. The pinch is real today but the chain growth curve and the storage curve aren't on a collision course; they're on roughly parallel tracks.
Two more practical angles worth weighing before going pre-segwit:
Pruning is the actual answer for uncle-jim-class nodes. A pruned node at 5GB still validates every block, still enforces consensus, still serves your own wallet. You lose only the ability to serve historical blocks to peers. For 99% of "sovereign individual" use cases that's the right tradeoff and it makes the storage cost ~free.
Reverting to pre-segwit doesn't shrink existing UTXOs, only new ones. So you'd still be carrying the historical witness data for every coin minted after 2017 — which is most of the supply. The political cost of a soft-fork-revert is enormous and the technical payoff per dollar of disk is small.
The signature-bloat-from-inscriptions critique stands on its own merits, but the upgrade-cost argument cuts weaker than it feels in the moment.
If 2TB at $200 is the binding constraint, the cost-per-byte trajectory is actually working in your favor over a 5–10 year horizon — $/TB has been dropping ~12-15%/yr historically and 4TB NVMe is already <$300 in 2026. The pinch is real today but the chain growth curve and the storage curve aren't on a collision course; they're on roughly parallel tracks.
Two more practical angles worth weighing before going pre-segwit:
The signature-bloat-from-inscriptions critique stands on its own merits, but the upgrade-cost argument cuts weaker than it feels in the moment.