Most people use laptops with SSD, and cant afford to have a blockchain size of 40 GB or bigger.. that consumes 1/3 or 1/6 of their SSD size.
If we want a truly decentralized network, nobody should be excluded. The solution is therefore to make the blockchain dynamic and small instead of one gigantic mirror on every HDD in the network.
That's a very bold claim, that most people use laptops with SSD. I for one do not know any of them.
I agree that the thing to do is to make a lightweight version of the blockchain that would contain only current spendable transaction outputs. But anyone willing to host the full blockchain should have the means to do so.
Not at all, nowdays most people buy thin clients like iPad (16GB-32GB) or small laptops (120GB-240GB) instead of heavy desktop PCs with 2TB HDD.
Heavy desktops will become a minority among households, so if we care about decentralization we must consider what kind of clients most people will be using within a few years.
When people need terrabyte storage they buy USB-drives or NAS-drives - which are useless to host the bitcoin client.