Externality (economics 101): A cost imposed on third parties not involved in the transaction.
The transaction:
- You pay miner $0.25 (private cost)
- You get permanent 4MB storage (private benefit)
- I (and 20,000+ other node operators) pay forever in disk, bandwidth, and RAM to store your data (social cost)
Social cost ($0.25 × 20,000+ nodes × infinite time) > Private cost ($0.25)
That's not opinion - that's the definition of a negative externality. You privatized the benefit, socialized the cost.
Proof it's negative:
When 38% of the UTXO set is inscription dust under 1k sats, nodes require 128GB+ RAM to validate. Raspberry Pi operators drop out. Validation centralizes to data centers. That's an objective cost to decentralization.
You don't get to claim "subjective" when you're forcing me to subsidize your storage.
Run Knots. Internalize your own costs.