what hardware I use... could be a damn server or a fucking mobile device.
you talk about cost of electricity / maintenance or also about the cost of managing the liquidity ?
If is a personal Bitcoin Core
I never thought about that and I don't care how much will be.
If is a personal BTC Core + LN
It doesn't matter, it is to secure my wallets.
If is a business node
Then I have to see how much is the return to sustain the cost of a remote hosting or even a self hosting. Running a professional LN node is cheap and require investment. For a small merchant that sells bananas on the street will be quite costly to run a remote node on Voltage or whatever VPS + LN channels management.
You see ? Is really hard to just vote an answer that means nothing.
Fair: I meant personal bitcoin node (question covers whether you do it yourself or pay for hosting). I guess I could have added not a LN node too, but I think it is clear that bitcoin node is not a LN node.
a simple bitcoin core node you can run it for zero cost.
You don't need a fancy box for that.
You don't even need a machine for that if want to go extreme.
I think it is clear that bitcoin node is not a LN node.
If people mean a LN node they usually say LN node. I guess the set specified by bitcoin node could include LN nodes, but mostly, people seem to say bitcoin node when they refer to software that syncs with the block chain and they seem to say LN node when they mean an additional node that watches/manages lightning channels.
By the way: do you know of a mobile wallet that runs a bitcoin full node? (By full I mean pruned or otherwise, but that downloads and verifies every block)?
Blixt and Zeus, using neutrino.
Also Breez, but they will move away from that model to Greenlight.
What people have a wrong understanding of "running a full node" is that they have to run a dedicated machine 24/7/365.
And is quite wrong that assumption.
Just to "verify" your own transactions you need just a junky laptop with bitcoin core software and open it only when you need it.
Yes. If you do it yourself and you didn't spend too much on specialized hardware, it can get close to free. Also you don't have keep it on all the time.
Next question is how much bigger can blocks get without making running a node expensive?
There is zero need for specialize hardware. You can buy a used 1 liter PC off Ebay for around $100. That is unless your time is worth more and you are referring to pre-setup solutions like Start9. It actually takes very little resources to run a node. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
I don't know the answer to your second question. I think bigger blocks is about many things. Mining, network usage, disk space, and processing power. I wasn't really involved back during the block size wars but I suspect block size could increase at some point in the future depending on the advancement of baseline computing power.
Any old computer will probably get the job done. I was referring to the prefab solutions that you see advertised everywhere. I'm assuming some people must use those, otherwise where would those companies get their advertising budgets?
Regarding the blocksize question: In talking to nonbitcoiners, I've often said that the network gets its decentralization and censorship resistance from lots of people running nodes. Therefore we should make it cheap to do this. And that that was one of the big reasons for not increasing block size.
Maybe this is just a spurious argument that I have blindly accepted, but it makes sense to me.
But then I was wondering, do people feel like running a node is expensive? Especially in the situation with recent complaints about non transaction data filling blocks. Hence my poll.
There will always be a business for people whose time is worth more than the savings and learning from doing the work. The prices on these solutions are very good IMO. I don't buy them because I'd rather do it myself.
Yeah, I understand what you are saying about being expensive. That's a relative question of course as you know. I do not believe most people in bitcoin will ever run a node. I do believe we will see many many more nodes than are being run today but based on people's behaviors in other areas most are too lazy. That's fine by me. I'm not basing my hope on the actions of others. There will always be an elect group of bitcoiners that carry the torch. I'm all for lowing the bar. Companies making it easy, nodes being baked into hardware that does other things. I can see that happening. It will get easier and cheaper. It will get cheaper the faster we get to a bitcoin standard.
Unless you're on dial-up or some kind of mobile network, you shouldn't be having trouble downloading even full blocks. It's only a couple megabytes every 10 minutes. Could be something else going on