How much does it cost to run a full node for a worldwide monetary network? Answer inside.

Most people are concerned if they will be able to run full nodes if we let Bitcoin scale.

I will show how one can easily calculate these costs so get better information to make better decisions.

First lets make some educated guesses:

• We want to look at node running at different adoption rates. We will look at:
  • 1% (200 times the capability of BTC
  • 25% (5000 times the capability of BTC)
  • 80% (A mind blowing 16000 times the capability of BTC)
• We assume 1.3 transaction per person per day. Sources: frbservices.org/news/press-releases/051325-findings-from-2025-diary-of-consumer-payment-choice ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op201.en.pdf
• An average monetary transaction has the size of 250 Byte
• We take our disk prices from here: backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ ~$15 per terabyte

With all that we can now calculate our costs.

With these we can now calculate the block sizes for each:

• 1% 181 MB
• 25% 4.5 GB
• 80% 14 GB

And the needed diskspace per year:

• 1% 10 TB
• 25% 240 TB
• 80% 760 TB

And lastly we can calculate our cost with todays Disk prices:

• 1% $190 per year
• 25% $4700 per year
• 80% $15200 per ear

As comparison a Netflix premiums account costs $324.

So for the price of a Netflix account we could already serve 1% of the population with sound p2p money. Likely more, because this amount of transaction would actually enable people to use L2s self custodial and likely boost our numbers ~50 times.

Even the 80% goal is not out of this world. How much will storage prices fall in the next decade? How much does an average westerner spend for a hobby? I have seen people spend thousands of dollars for games.