Running a Bitcoin node: is your own node worth €16 to €39 a year in electricity?

Running a Bitcoin node means keeping a full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain on your own hardware and checking every transaction yourself against the network's rules. For retail investors it pays off if they hold their coins themselves and no longer want to tell an outside server which addresses belong to them. Running costs are modest: at German electricity prices, an energy-efficient small computer uses roughly €16 to €39 a year. Storage is the bigger expense, because the blockchain now takes up well over 600 gigabytes.