I was quite disappointed to read that Satoshi envisioned huge centralised farms and users just being users paying fees. That means the end game is a cartel of infrastructure rich companies - back to square one for the proles.
Thats a misrepresentation in any case.That response was to specific questions about the system being able to work at all. My understanding of it at the time was simply what it said at face value. Proof the system can work, the users get to choose the trade-offs; which is something classical centeralized systems couldn't offer. ::shrugs:: Keep in mind that anything written in 2009-2011 was written in a very different world, not one where people just take for granted that Bitcoin works _at all_.
It's sad that people feel the need to put words in other people's mouths in any case. The whole appeal to authority hugely undermines the principles of the system. If you want something that lives and dies on the whim of some authority: centeralized systems can have much better performance and security properties.
The node incentives thing doesn't seem technically feasable. Or rather, the system had that built in but it was undermined by pooled mining. We now know how to avoid any _need_ to run pooled mining now, but it's always less costly to do so (due to the costs of running a node).
SPV could work in a way that more or less obviates the need for almost anyone to run a node at all; but the existing software never implemented that-- and those working on SPV right now are okay with fairly centeralized trust models and so they seem to not care. (Or even view the low security as a virtue).
I was referring to this post where he states
Quote
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.
Have I misrepresented? He seems to be clearly stating that distributed nodes are a small scale solution with consolidation at scale. That I find depressing and stand by what I said. If I have misinterpreted, then please correct me. The only other interpretation that I can see is he is agreeing with me, that unless clients do the block processing and miners only "generate" coins, then the result will be big server farms as we are seeing now. I think that is a rather wistful reading of the words, however.
