For shits and giggles I was looking into the blockstream bitcoin satellite stuff and it got me thinking about Monero in super bandwidth constrained situations.

My assumptions are made with 300KB blocks.

With 720 blocks per day at 300KB/block the full chain should grow by ~216MB/day or ~6.7GB/mo. The pruned chain is ~82GB according to my node at the moment and if I remember correctly it uses ~1/8 the data of the full chain. So it should grow by ~27MB/day or ~837MB/mo.

If I were limited to my 5GB capped cell data plan it would take me ~16.5 months using all my data to sync the pruned chain.

If I wanted to run a node in a situation like that, it seems like the best course of action would be to use a mobile wallet and connect to remote nodes, earn some Monero by selling something on like XMRBazaar, and then paying someone to buy an SSD to sync the pruned chain and send it to me.

I live a middle-class existence in the United States, so don’t need to worry about this. But what about somebody in Nigeria or something? From what I understand, even a five gigabyte data plan would be quite expensive in places like that. And so even that is somewhat unrealistic.

Edit: Correction. Apparently, it downloads the entire blockchain, which is currently 200 gigabytes, and then only writes 82 gigabytes of that to the disk, which means that my 5 gigabyte data plan would take me 40 months not 16.5.

Edit 2: It sounds like with a 5GB data plan, you couldn’t even keep up with the chain, because every node at the tip is a full node, and so it would still download 6.7 gigs per month, but only write 837 megs of that to the disk.