Wrong. Sharding does not need 8k-9k nodes it will be added as soon as it will be finished. Network need sharding with 8k-9k nodes -> means it won't grow stable without sharding being that big. And sharding is currently in experimental stage, at least it was like that 2 weeks ago -
That is true, for sharding to be implemented we do not need 8-9k nodes, if you are looking at this as litteral as possible.
Developers said that their calculations are that in current state, network can validate 8-9k identities, and that they want network to reach that number or as close as possible to reach maximum validation robustness without sharding. And then to take that model and make shardes of it for maximum network capacity with sharding enabled.
Current limiting factor for number of identites that can be validated, not the number of nodes, that is not the point (especialy now when we have shared node and web validation capability), is the number of transactions that can be packed in blocks during short session. And from there we have that 8-9k limit. But as this is theory, we will see how the new tecnology decentralised blockchain pop network performs in practise. We are the first testing this technology.
I will soon give link to a web validation workflow for people with bad pc/internet, or for people who don't have pc at all, so they can do validation on my shared node. I am hostin shared node on vps with 2 cores 4gb ram, it should be enough for 50 people.
We have given huge potential in bringing in more users, it's partialy up to us to use that. For hardware resources that could run only 2 nodes safely, we now have increase of x25, that is huge in my opinion. It's kind of sharding before sharding.