No, I am actually trying to understand the argument you are making and seems to me that you take a lot of things on good faith for the game theory to work. In the replies above, you have repeatedly said that miners will be kept in check because "community", "media" will know as soon as anything happens. But this has to be detected right? That is what a full node does and in a decentralized system, we need more of them.
For getting rid of a false discourse, one should absolutely remain focused.
1- There is just one hypothetical threat that full nodes can ever detect: illegal inflation of bitcoins. There is no other threat to bitcoin that full-nodes are capable to detect not mentioning their inability to mitigate.
2- Illegal inflation of bitcoin is possible either by allowing multiple copies of a coin to circulate around (double-spending) or by printing bitcoin out of thin air.
3- Both threats are considered existential. A single instance of such a catastrophic event will destroy bitcoin and the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem practically. We are talking about 2 hundred billion dollars being at stake at the time of this writing.
4- In bitcoin, PoW is designed as the solution for this threat with game theory as the backup solution for the centralization possibilities and 51% problem.
5- With the centralization of mining we experienced soon after less than a couple of years from the Genesis, we are existing in the edges of a 51% attack for almost a decade now. Fortunately, game theory is doing well and we are good, for now, and probably for a long time.
6- Centralization of mining because of pools is bad and should be addressed somehow.
7- In the meantime, we have a scaling problem and some other less critical ones like privacy issues, they are to be addressed, as well.
Now here is the problem:
Core devs of bitcoin somehow have become convinced that bitcoin is what it is and there is no hope to do anything disruptive about the two BIG problems:
Centralization of Mining and
Scaling. They've gone that far to adopt Buterin's stupid Trilemma assertion about denouncing feasibility of solving the two at the same time (with a fake third factor, security, he has added to emulate something he has read in high school, the Combined Gas Law
).
This give-up strategy was first triggered by the embracing raw scaling proposals like th one gave birth to bcash after the scaling debate. People went all-in on the idea of every scaling idea is somehow related to a suspicious centralization agenda, just like bcash.
Well, it was obviously just a stupid and naive generalization, but it got viral and became a part of the culture and now it is time to get rid of it, ok?
One important part of this give-up strategy is the exaggerated and artificial distinction between full nodes and miners. Originally, bitcoin does not make such a distinction between the two, right now bitcoin client code has a built-in mining feature and every full-node is officially (not practically) a mining node too!
The give-up strategy is primarily a give-up on PoW. By advertising full-nodes as the superheroes of security and decentralization, other than getting off-track from bitcoin's most important innovation, Proof of Work, the most revolutionary phenomenon in the 21st century for the least, this strategy is neutralizing any opportunity to improve the situation.
I'm advocating for both: decentralization of mining and scaling bitcoin at the same time but it is very important to note: a decentralized mining scene needs full nodes, many many of them, solo miners are full nodes, remember?
So, I'm the one who truly loves full nodes. The give-up strategist? No, he is just a fake lover.
Alienating scaling/mass-adoption/decentralization proposals by spreading FUD about PoW is an alien discourse and has nothing to do with bitcoin white paper.
This is a loaded political statement regarding the bitcoin developers and i personally don't agree with it, whatever my opinion counts for. IMO, there is no "True Vision" in bitcoin whitepaper that needs a zealous following. Satoshi wouldn't have shared his humongous work on a public forum to cypherpunks all over the world in an easy to modify repository if he thought that "his whitepaper" is the end-all for everything.
One point: I'm not the one who started it, and I'm not the one who continues it. People, dev or not, should take care of their attitude and behave sanely. The one who starts a war is not always the one who ends it. Politicizing bitcoin development proposals is not my option, it is how you are treated when you are discussing critical issues in bitcoin.
