The mining is not the incentive, the Bitcoin reward is. Take away the reward and nobody will be mining. The other reward is the miners fees,
and if nobody is using the technology and the reward was taken away, people would also stop mining. The only other reason I can think of for
people to host nodes, would be for financial gain. If they built their business around Bitcoin, they will have to run nodes to sustain it... So we
should get all big merchants to run nodes to help support the decentralized network.
keeping in mind, that as the level of network falls , it would only do so to match the demand of the network. Those left behind would get a far larger proportion of the pie, and as those incentives became more lucrative, more miners would rush in to fill this space. this is why , BitCoin mining is now a long position by default.
your thought about Merchants is correct , almost any good citizen in the crypto space should wear Full node as a badge of honor.
