Statelessness/Verkle does so much more than decrease the cost of running a node by the cost of one SSD.

First and foremost, the most important question should be: Do you want to increase mainnet gas 10x? Verkle will enable this.

https://twitter.com/gakonst/status/1790428848397357214

But Verkle will do many more important things:

1. Simplify Ethereum node architecture. The EL can become a library instead of being a full blown node.

I'm thinking about a new sharding design, where instead of having independent proposers for each shard, all shard blocks in one slot are proposed together with the beacon block. This leads to a major simplification of the sharding design 1/n

notes.ethereum.org/@dankrad/new_s… In the previous design, at each slot, shard blocks are independently proposed and data availability has to be verified by committees. We can't just do that check globally for all shards or each proposer has the ability to disrupt the whole process (liveness failure) 2/n