It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU.
This is incorrect. Satoshi had this to say on the subject.
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.
(Sauce)The scenarios are playing out as expected with an end game of a cartel of miners, users with web wallets and the occasional hipster running their own full node.
The idea of economic incentives for full nodes is an attempt for already committed early adopters, to squeeze a few crumbs from the miners' table in the face of the inevitable. In the end, most full nodes will be run by the miners so it is a zero-sum game.
First of all, that quote from Satoshi is predicting the centralization of Mining Pools and Mining Farms
in the future and not the centralization and loss of non-mining nodes. The burden he is referring to is the
difficulty increase in mining, not hardware capabilities. Satoshi does not address the question asked by the OP.
Because his original design was 1 CPU = 1 Vote, and he was blinded by that higher goal, he disregarded the
inevitable separation of the two systems (mining & non-mining nodes) due to different factors and thus failed
to design and account for a corresponding system to "incentive" the "transaction nodes" so to ensure a large
enough network for a truly attack resistant and globally decentralization verification network.
Your answer to the OP is essentially Satoshi designed a decentralized network only as a gimmick and intended to
make a centralized attack prone network within 3 years. Either you are correct and we are attempting to remedy this,
or you are wrong and reading more into Satoshi's words than even he knew at the time.
Your answer to the OP lacks imagination and assumes stagnation.
