Bare minimum system requirements for Core The Bitcoin.org page on Bitcoin Core Requirements and Warnings lists three types of setups:




#
Type
Disk Gb
Gb / mo
RAM Mb
Windows




1
Bare Min (default)
350
8 / 150
512
7/8.x


2
Bare Min (custom)
5
5 / 0.3
256
7/8.x


3
Minimum Recommended
350
15 / 150
1,024
7/8.x/10




I don't think I want to dedicate 1/3 Tb to running Bitcoin Core, so #1 and #3 are impractical, but #2 seems feasible. However, there are two problems with #2:

The download specs for all three types have the footnote, &quot;Plus a one-time 340 GB download the first time you start Bitcoin Core.&quot; That seems like a contradiction of the requirement of only 5 Gb of disk space for type #2. So which of the following is correct?

The footnote should not appear in type #2, or
The Disk space spec of 5 Gb is wrong, or
I'm allowed to discard the initial download after starting Core.


The spec says type #2 is not compatible with Windows 10. Is that true?


Summary: For the Bare Minimum (With Custom Settings), i.e., type #2 above:

Is the spec of 5 Gb minimum disk space correct? How is that not a contradiction of the footnote stating a requirement of an initial download of 340 Gb?
Is it compatible with Windows 10, even though that OS is not listed in the spec?
Bare min setup uses the bitcoin's feature called pruning.
In prune mode your node will sync the whole blockchain (the data on the website is a bit outdated, it's closer to 400GB now), but it has to start from block 0. If you set your pruning to 5 GB, it will start syncing from block 0 till the 5GB limit and after that will still sync (so your internet connection has to go through whole 400GB) but will delete older blocks. So at the end your history will be only latest few dozen k blocks. But your node in the process will &quot;parse&quot; all the 400+ GB of data, just keeping latest 5GB at a time.
Yes, bitcoind/bitcoinqt works on windows 10 :)