Some people only have mobile to connect to the internet. No PCs, 3G. Lot of people actually. This way they can validate transactions for themselves. Could just sync for personal transactions and run in listen-only for minimum impact. I think it is great that this is now possible -- kudos to Core.
Well to be honest, I would rather see an effort to get better Internet access and stable electrical power to those people.
Feel free to donate.
Rolling out fiber optic infrastructure is insanely expensive, one of the reasons why its not very widespread yet. Bitcoin is limited to the private/govt internet infrastructure (one of its weakenesses) so it makes sense to aim to accomomdate high latency/low bandwidth situations, rather than aiming to eventually be ahead of the tech curve. What Id like to see are real scaling solutions for bitcoin that mean you can run a node on a phone AND we can see continued adoption.
What I'd like to know is how much spam can be squeezed out of the system. People say "spam" is subjective but it (and "dust") have pretty specific definitions in bitcoins history -- uneconomic transactions. There is still a lot of dust tx being pushed around (that's why the threshold went up recently to 2730 from 546 satoshis). A fee market should help squeeze some of that traffic out.
We gonna need a fee market sooner than later. Going on 16 million out 21 million coins already mined. That means we are on the tail end. When that reward dwindles, fees need to be there to incentivize miners to secure the system.
