It’s perverse you are proud of that and chose a tiny hard drive size over becoming actually useful and doing more than seven transactions per second. Time marches on, technology improves, but Bitcoin is proud they can run a node on a computer from 1995.
Decentralization/trustless aspect of Bitcoin is the utmost important thing, without those, there's no need for it, we can just use fiat.
Once you've accepted that premise, the next question is how do you achieve the most decentralization? The answer is by having the most nodes. How do you get people to run nodes? Make it super cheap to run. It's simple really, people are not paid to run nodes (miners != nodes). It's not about storage space, you also have to consider network latency and propagating those blocks across a large adversarial network.
I bought a second 10TB harddrive just to be able to run a full eth node, right now even fast sync of eth requires like 400GB+, full archives sits at 6TB+ [1]. When infura went down, the whole network had issues [2]. I'm really hoping the eth2 will somewhat improve the situation, but we'll see.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacit...
It’s perverse you are proud of that and chose a tiny hard drive size over becoming actually useful and doing more than seven transactions per second. Time marches on, technology improves, but Bitcoin is proud they can run a node on a computer from 1995.