> There's no reason to think "as many as possible" is needed. Realistically if there's even 1000 independent entities (nodes) is that not enough? What's a realistic attack that is blocked by having another 1000 people run a node in their home?
The same kinds of attacks that have been being orchestrated against Bitcoin for the past few years - political attacks. I run a node as a means to help foster a solution to the Triffin Paradox as much as I do to transact securely and to avoid the various attacks possible against me individually should I not run a node (like replay attacks should I trade BCC). My node is my means to enforcing monetary policy that doesn't destroy my Bitcoins, allow others to create more, etc.
> On top of that, with small blocks and 3rd party payment channels, there's very little reason for people who aren't big financial institutions to even care. Gavin Andresen put it well: "Hurray, we just reinvented the SWIFT or ACH systems."
This can be said of any solution that attempts to raise the block size as well. How different is a Bitcoin that only has a few hundred or thousand nodes due to resource requirements being prohibitive to others different than ACH and SWIFT either? Worse off, if I can't audit the blockchain because it's too big, then I have to depend on people. At least with lightning, I can audit the source of money.
> And if core hadn't been so pigheaded about even going to 2 or 4MB, we'd have solid evidence of the impact in block size.
Why get political? Can you really argue that Core is being pigheaded? Core's development has made a lot of sense to me considering that Bitcoin has been under attack for a long time now. What would you do if:
1. One of the primary developers went outside of the until-then productive channels of protocol development? [2]
2. To attempt to orchestrate a block size increase
3. At the same time multiple attacks meant to flood the blockchain with superflous transactions are started and continue [3][4][5]
4. While social media bots were employed in r/bitcoin that categorically downvoted all content not related to increasing the block size [6]
5. And, a massive bug fix that enables other means of scaling is propagandized against to the end of using it as collateral to raise the block size [7]
6. While the same people who have been attempting to raise the block size get behind a person claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, whom can't provide any credible proof and rather provides as convoluted as possible proof [8]
7. Who ultimately ends up on the team of the Bitcoin clone in question after appearing at a "Future of Bitcoin" conference coincidentally missing anybody related to Bitcoin's development of the past 8 years, yelling about things that no reasonable engineer can actually interpret as meaningful science or engineering. [9]
And at the end of the day, all these people call you pigheaded for continuing to develop software in such a way that I can maintain sovereignty over my bitcoins without having to ask anyone for permission. It's simply amazing to me that Core are successfully being painted as villains in this space. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users from access to the blockchain. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users of their ability to enforce a monetary policy realized by a token that those users provided the liquidity to make worth attacking. Core have been the only thing in the way.
And why should they get out of the way? The only argument people have is "because it will be fine and because Bitcoin needs to grow." That's not science and engineering. The internet is maintained by a few thousand entities, and can you say that it's decentralized enough? Once a year we have to black out websites so Congress doesn't destroy it. Once a week I read something about "if only we had better security at layer 2 or 3". And now we're going to make the same mistakes with the internet of money.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-e...
[3] http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/innovation/coi...
[4] https://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-spam-attack-stressed-n...
[5] http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/03/20/appears-another-spam-attac...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4biob5/research_in...
[7] https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-seg...
[8] https://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-stev...
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1_gxvx_QGo