That's an old article in CoinDesk, but the problem has only gotten worse. Probably the chief reasons for the drop are *How large the blockchain has become (and difficult to manage on home computers), and The proliferation of wallet software that does not download the full chain. The Bitcoin Foundation wrote about this problem a month or so ago, too.

A lot of us run full nodes on VPS. That can be pretty inexpensive -- at $2/mo. But more help is certainly needed. All of us who benefit from the network ought to give back to it in ways commensurate with our received benefit.

Sooo, one day we give $20 for each BTC we own and the next we take it back? 

I think we expected that mainstream users will largely use online and non-node wallets. Most people want a system than is lighter and can run on cell phones. You don't have to rely on another entity to use BTC, but I bet in the future 90% will.

Most of them don't bother to run one because of their bandwidth and large disk space requirement. People would ultimately want to use the wallet instantly and Bitcoin core typically take around a few hours to sync and on some computers, even days. SPV wallet are more convenient. The network need more reliable node with high availability so it is pretty useless for a average home user to run a full node.

It's a considerable problem. Decentralization is at stake.

I don't understand why Gavin is pushing for an automatic block size limit increase that will make this problem only worse (I think the block size limit should be raised by demand only, not in an automatic fashion). Imho it's a totally wrong perception of priorities to aim at including as many transaction as possible without costs while the foundation of the whole network is in danger.

Enabling semi-full-nodes via pruning is extremely important for network health.

ya.ya.yo!

You have to differentiate between the quality of the nodes. Home PCs which are up a few hours a day on low bandwith or nodes on dedicated 24/7 servers. I don't know if there is a metric to get this information. The plain number of nodes doesn't mean much. Today many people run full nodes on a VPS.

Just using my MacBook. No clue of how VPS things work lol.

yes  it is so slow now.

If you're interested in the VPS thing, see my post of earlier this year: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/582817.0

There are good people that will set you up one for free.

Just because the limit as to how large each block can be is raised does not mean that the actual size of blocks will increase. The actual size of blocks will increase up to the block limit based on the amount of on-chain transactions that bitcoin has.

I would say that the main reason that we are seeing less nodes is because people no longer need to run a full node in order to run a wallet. I think this will be reversed as more companies start to accept and use bitcoin. I would predict that companies like exchanges, merchants and payment processors (like coinbase/bitpay) will be the primary operators of nodes as they have a very good reason to want to have a full node (and really a well-connected full node)