Semantics...
You download the entire 60GB, then it gets trimmed to 2GB... the 2GB footprint is what I'm referring to (assuming his figure was accurate)...
2GB of disk space costs me $0.20/month as opposed to the 60GB+, which would cost $6+/month
What about bandwidth? Some people have bandwidth limits and still downloading 60GB of data requires bandwidth. The bandwidth requirement doesn't change, just the storage requirement. It isn't just semantics as there are other things that are still affected by requiring a full download. The pruning doesn't affect the time it takes to download, index, and verify the data. It also doesn't affect the CPU requirements, still need a decently fast CPU to crunch all that data. But in terms of storage, yes it is a big improvement.
The downside is that you can't fully sync someone else and if everyone were to prune, then we would lose a large portion of the blockchain which of course would be bad.
I'm curious if this trimming is done in real-time, or after the entire 60GB is downloaded... i.e., could I get away with a trimmed node on a 5-10GB drive, or would it crash after downloading the first 100k blocks?
It is done in real time. It stores until it reaches that threshold and then starts deleting the old stuff so that you maintain the same amount of space taken up on the disk.
