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But immediate usage is not the only time it's done. Any time a node syncs up, that has to get synced up again. And anyone who streams the chain in the future. It might be 1kb now, but in a year, that might have caused GBs of usage.

This doesn't even account for all the internal processing that Leo specifically needs to do for your thread. It would be great to hear from @khaleelkazi what all happens when a thread is made.