Running a Bitcoin node is the healthiest way to contribute to the Bitcoin Network but in the past couple of years it has become very expensive to run one both in storage and bandwidth.

A process called blocksonly mode was introduced in Bitcoin 0.12 with the aim of helping Bitcoin Node owners save a hefty amount of bandwidth and still contribute to the network. blocksonly mode allows nodes to stop requesting, relaying and listening for transactions until they are bundled up in a block.

This essentially means that your node is only able to see and relay transactions that have one confirmation, while this isn’t as a contribution as a full node, it uses 88% less bandwidth, coming at about 150 megabytes of incoming data per day and under 1 megabyte of outgoing data.

These nodes can also send transaction with their built in wallet or using one of their whitelisted peers.

This makes it a lot cheaper to run a node, so get on with it and run your full node!

Resources

• Documentation for running a full node
• Gregory Maxwell writeup on blocksonly mode