In case anyone is curious about the size of the Ethereum blockchain (which the linked article doesn't even mention but seems to inevitably come up in comments),

In case anyone is curious about the size of the Ethereum blockchain (which the linked article doesn't even mention but seems to inevitably come up in comments), I took some measurements recently: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1004506114392838146 https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1004506114392838146 tl;dr: ~65GB of bandwidth is required to download all the necessary data. The default node indexing and denormalization of this data takes around 100GB after compacting.