Why does running my own Ethereum node now require hardware that costs more every year?

Ethereum world state grew from 180 GB in 2019 to 1,410 GB in 2025, a 7.8x increase in six years, and it grows with every transaction and contract deployment. Since each full node must store the entire state, the hardware floor rises continuously, and operators who ran on commodity SSDs in 2021 are now priced out or running degraded setups. The Ethereum Foundation has outlined three paths forward: state expiry, state archival, and partial statelessness, but each is a multi-year effort with unresolved tradeoffs around history access, tooling compatibility, and light client security. Verkle trees, a prerequisite for the stateless clients that would relieve node operators, have been in development since 2021 and are still not in production. No shipped solution exists today.