Power users that could dedicated a $50 drive? Storage just keeps getting cheaper. Bandwidth is more likely to be a limiting factor. But looking at dedicated ser

Power users that could dedicated a $50 drive? Storage just keeps getting cheaper. Bandwidth is more likely to be a limiting factor. But looking at dedicated servers, $50/mo gets you 8TB of disk + plenty of bandwidth. Checkpointing cannot be hard. The hashes of 58400 blocks is not even 2MB. So with a few dozen megs you can checkpoint every single block. Then you can download blocks on-demand if you need to find particular transactions or whatever. What is really lost if we tossed the previous blocks after a year and just kept balances? But you're right: who needs to run a node?