Here's how I explain it: Say there was only one copy of the entire works of Shakespeare. Someone making a second copy would be incredibly valuable to everyone in the world, because there would be less risk of his entire works being lost in one disaster. If someone else also created a third copy of Shakespeare's entire works, that would still be pretty valuable, because you aren't relying on only 2 copies, which could still pretty feasibly both be destroyed. However, what if there are 100+ copies of Shakespeare's entire works? A new copy being made has some marginal value to everyone. It is still making it less likely that Shakespeare's works are lost forever, but not nearly so valuable as when there were only a few copies. And when there are tens of thousands of copies, then adding one new copy doesn't really move the needle at all for benefitting the community at all. The chances of his entire works being lost in that scenario would be statistically identical regardless of whether one new copy was added or not. It's the same with Bitcoin nodes. When there were only a handful of nodes on the network, every new node added was a major value in increased decentralization and decreased likelihood that Bitcoin could wver be killed. Now that there are tend of thousands of nodes on the network, the marginal value of one new node being added is effectively 0 in terms of the overall community. That said, just like having YOUR OWN copy of Shakespeare's complete works at this point has no value to anyone else, but has great value to you, since you can now read them at your leisure, having your own Bitcoin node is a massive value to you, even though it isn't really helping anyone else in a measurable way. You gain a lot of increased privacy by having your wallet software connect to your own node, rather than whatever it defaults to. You can also browse your own mempool, rather than doxxing what transactions you are interested in to a public mempool explorer. You also get to decide what Bitcoin is for yourself by running the implementation you most align with. In short, run a node for yourself, not for anyone else.