Go here: https://bitinfocharts.com/ https://bitinfocharts.com/ Click on eth, see that the ethereum chain is 630 GB. I don't know what you mean by "these are n

Go here: https://bitinfocharts.com/ https://bitinfocharts.com/ Click on eth, see that the ethereum chain is 630 GB. I don't know what you mean by "these are not full nodes". > Not trivial when you take into account that to assure decentralization the nodes must also broadcast the whole blockchain. Compare the costs of having to broadcast a 6.5tb file for an average of ~30 nodes per month. It will probably cost >$1 thousand. Not very acessible. Miners broadcast blocks. These numbers you have are made up. Your chain size is off by a factor of 10. Full nodes just help with whatever bandwidth they have. Only the miners really have to send out blocks and sync with the chain. I don't know where you are coming up with your ideas of sending out the full chain every month, 30 nodes, or the cost. A $10 vps can cover the bandwidth of 1000 people syncing with the chain. You can get gigabit connections with multiple terabytes for that much. I think exchanges and miners can handle that, not to mention anyone with a cable modem. There is plenty of headroom, there is no centralization from bandwidth or anything else. Only in cryptocurrency do people think a gigabyte a day in bandwidth is a problem while the average person is streaming multiple gigabytes in youtube, netflix and steam games every day. > Sure, you could use another crypto that incorporates the same trade-offs as Lightning Network. Other currencies don't have the trade-offs of a second layer. You make a transaction, you see it show up. Only bitcoin and ethereum have expensive transactions. Everything else works. > the network effect is already building around Bitcoin Bitcoin's average transaction fee was $31 a few days ago. The average transaction value on bitcoin's chain is over $411,000 USD. There is no network effect of bitcoin because it has been crippled. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-eth-ltc-doge-bch-etc-xmr.html#3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-et... > I don't run a full node. That's up to the community to decide. I asked you where you got your numbers and how you came to your conclusions. You said "I don't run a full node. That's up to the community to decide". That doesn't even make sense as a response, let alone answer the question. > There is no easy answer as you are seemingly implying. There are easy answers, don't use chains with expensive transactions. Don't use chains that refuse to scale. Bitcoin refuses to scale because the people that took it over want to sell a second layer that solves a problem (poorly) that they created. There is no real problem here. There is no reason cryptocurrencies can't scale to many orders of magnitude more transactions. There is no reason to pay money to use a second layer.