[etrabroline]

>$89/year, which makes it a non-negligible expense for anyone wanting to run a full node.

Why on earth would a non-miner run a full node just to observe other people's transactions? Satoshi addressed this all the way back in 2009 in the whitepaper itself. Consumers (non-miners) would just download transactions they care about and run truncated observer nodes, and $89/yr isn't even that much money for a "full" observer (non-miner) node if you care about being a datahoarder. Killing bitcoin as a functioning currency because some people think Satoshi was wrong is mind-numbing. Of course, when your paycheck depends on not understanding something...