The way you downplay the importance of non-mining nodes is ridiculous imo. Non-mining nodes can keep the miners in check from acting in stupid ways. Non-mining nodes, can treat them with UASFs, and using any client they want to validate the transactions.
Well, that is the standard dogma, but I have challenged different people in finding a logical hole in the gedanken experiment that proves the contrary, and the only thing they come up with is what I'd call rhetoric, that is to say, non-logical arguments (like saying that I must be paid by someone, that I'm an idiot, that I'm wrong, that this and that such, but never a logical argument).
The closest come arguments that
confuse non-mining nodes with users in the market. But that's wrong, because users are people doing transactions, and they mostly use light wallets.
There are millions of bitcoin users, and only a few thousand of full nodes. So full nodes are at most a promille of the user community, and are not representative of the users nor of their market weight. As such, one clearly needs to distinguish the economic weight of users (who only care about the value of their token, and their ability to transact) and the "large majority of non mining nodes". So non-mining nodes are not "the users", or "the market".
My gedanken experiment is as I outlined above: suppose that all 20 important mining pools (and their miners) decide to make ONLY a block chain of 2 MB blocks, and that 99% of the non-mining nodes refuse that, but that the users only want to continue transact their tokens from their light wallets or online wallets, no matter what (to separate the effect of non-mining nodes from that of users). As such, they will use whatever means they have, to continue to use bitcoin transactions, and don't care about any of these politics.
Tell me how those non-mining nodes are going to keep in check the miners and the users and force them to remain on the 1 MB blocks, if the users connect their light wallets directly to the miner nodes, and the miner nodes are connected directly amongst themselves. We can also assume that exchanges cannot allow themselves to have a stopped node, as they would lose all their customers to the competition, so the exchanges are also going to use or a light wallet directly connected to the miner nodes, or upgrade their full node to the 2 MB protocol.
So, now we have:
- all miners making a 2 MB chain and they can continue do so because they send their blocks directly amongst themselves
- all users connect their light wallets directly to the miner nodes and send them their transactions
- exchanges are the less than 1% of non-mining nodes accepting 2 MB block chains and continue working
- all other (> 99%) non-mining nodes refuse these blocks, and want to "keep the miners in check, and menace them with a UASF"
Tell me how these non-mining nodes are going to succeed, which is your thesis, and would be the proof of the fact that non mining nodes keep the miners in check.
Once you finally realize (as Satoshi already told us in 2008) that "the only people needing to run full nodes are the people mining new coins", you might realize the futility of their existence in the power structures of bitcoin, and once you realize that, you might re-consider all arguments that are based upon the need of their maintaining in place and the compromises that go with that.
It is very simple. Demonstrate, in the above Gedanken experiment, the full power of the network of non-mining nodes, keeping miners and users in check.
