Well… It matters since the node count drop is happening. How else would you explain it?
Even if it is possible to run a node with a RPI and an external hd, the amount of time and effort required is extremely high and only dedicated Zcash supporters are going to go through.
Not to mention the ongoing bandwidth requirements.
Please, let’s recognize the Blockchain size is a problem for 99% of the people
Let’s imagine we could prune the node. Uneducated folks, the 99 % you mention, still wouldn’t run nodes because, IMHO, the issue isn’t size. So my answer to curiouschipmunk is I’m not sure the rate of change with respect to the size of the blockchain will ever overtake the (negative) rate of change in price of hardware that is needed to run it.
Should we optimize to be as small (size) and fast (sync) as as possible? Yes.
Do some folks in the community love to point out the spam / size / [insert new bad metric here] ? Also yes.
I just don’t see the risk though relative to other things. Appreciate your thoughts.
The blockchain size impacts more than the cost of the hardware. Bandwidth and time matter too. The fact that this is caused by useless spam and not valuable transactions somewhat exacerbate me. I think it’s harder to feel part of a mission when this mission is now mainly relaying and storing someone’s spam.
I think there’s no way to tell that the shielded transactions with hundreds of sender/recipients are “useless” or not. Though I agree that the blockchain size may deter a lot of people from using Zcash (in its current design and bandwidth requirement) let alone run a Zcash full node.
Just to be clear, there is already a prune option for zcashd but it disables the internal wallet and is incompatible with txindex flag. Ive never run a zcashd node like that before however so I don’t have any first-hand experience
Would be wild if it came out “the spam” was an unannounced application.
I hear you and appreciate your honesty. Solutions are coming 
I second the notion, and many other points above. The ongoing blockchain spam event is very bad for Zcash and the longer it goes on without mitigation it makes our community and developers appear hapless in the face of a severe challenge like this. The drop in node count is highly correlated to the spamming which leads me to conclude the same as others, that prior validators have thrown in the towel on supporting the Zcash network.
Is there any material timeline for when the spamming will be defended against by a technical upgrade to the protocol?
Mina has a tiny ‘chain’. Its 22kb. Its a snapshort of the chain. Its possible with recursive zkSNARKS to compress Zcash. The bloat will stay but its possible the reduce the size of the chain.
The spam is a problem. The bloat is a problem. Light wallet sync is a problem. We got to fix it. Fast. Its a deadweight on Zcash. It affects everyone and everything.
Can anyone who provided technical updates above, share a current update from down in the trenches? We haven’t received any follow up to this thread since Oct-Nov 2022 from ECC, ZF, or any other team, and we can all see that the issue remains unsolved. The last couple dozen comments have been speculative, opinion, or wandering off topic. Thx!
Steven isn’t at ECC since late last year I think, you’d wanna ask someone else
where is everyone tracking node counts and what stats are we targeting for ‘good’?
I see 7564 nodes on the blockchair site this morning. The 24hr tx count is 4255 and 4710 github stars. This has been reasonably average for the last few months.
Ethereum mainnet has between 4866 and 12700 nodes depending on how you count
btc has 15248 and had a 24hr tx count of 316,268
my btc full node is ~450gb, my eth node is around 650 gb with pruning, and my zec node is 267gb
Eth would be around 12 tb with no pruning. 10+ tb of spam nfts, tokens, and other bs
This is a bear market. Only true fans, businesses, and experts are running nodes. Nodes will come with price appreciation and adoption.
Zec node count is much higher than I would have guessed from this thread. Especially considering we push a majority of users to light wallets that all default to lightwalletd or zecwallet end points.
Edit:
Follow-up question: Is there an efficient way to know how many notes have been generated per pool?
iirc the tree can have at most 2^32 leaves and ‘spam’ could be be defined somehow related to this
You need to exclude anything labeled magicbean v6 and certainly anything below v5 (it doesnt count zebra nodes). The actual count is closer to 200
200 Zcash full nodes is the global count?
Yes, 20characters
200 is closer to what I would have guessed thh
Interesting, I went down the rabbit hole of magicbean v6 and flux.
They seem to be running the ~same software so it will have all the same limitations. Node running is incentivized in some sort of tiered model. They offer vps pricing for running a node from their website, It looks like it costs <30 eur to run a node a month.
minimum requirements:
Convenience is conformist utopian idealism premised on some other less-happy laborious thing. It can have the intoxicating effect of making other (counter-culture) options unthinkable. Be aware
IDK, I’m 100% for it being as easy as possible for people to deploy and run nodes. The lightwalled docker-compose file is 
If there was a Infura for zcash developers, I do not think that would be a bad thing
There is an ongoing grant for something like that. It would great to have an update on its status.
I think this is the grant: ZF Grants - Zcash Blockchain Infrastructure
From what I can see, the last update to milestones was paid out in May of 2022
@decentralistdan may have more insight
In my opinion, it is more important to decentralize Lightwalletd instances.
There aren’t any official public deployments. ZW and NH received grants to run their servers but I am not sure it qualifies as public.
But even if you count them, that is only 2.