The size of the blockchain right now is 390GB. It grows at 144MB/day. You can get a 2TB hard disk for $50 right now, and it'll be enough for 30 years more. 1 M

The size of the blockchain right now is 390GB. It grows at 144MB/day. You can get a 2TB hard disk for $50 right now, and it'll be enough for 30 years more. 1 MB blocks take 2 minutes and 30 seconds on at 56 Kbps, which means you can keep up with the blockchain on a freaking dial-up modem. I'm not seeing exactly where the problem is here, and in what scenario would somebody go "Gee, I'd love to run a full node, if only it took something less amazing than a computer I can find lying in the garbage for free". If you want more nodes what you need instead is incentives to run a node. Give people some reason to run one other than that it provides some nebulous benefit to the network, and so it's a good thing to run this out of the goodness of their hearts.