It would seem to me that your stated goal for 'decentralization' is an increase in the number of non-mining nodes.
No.
The goal is to avoid drastic increases to the amount of information which peers are required to share between each other in order to keep the network operational along with retaining the ability to run a full node (which may be required to become a mining node (use your imagination)) on easily accessible consumer grade hardware.
I fully expect outright attacks on Bitcoin in the future. To me it seems like we've passed "peak freedom" in the civilized world, and Bitcoin is an extremely powerful tool for obtaining and maintaining individual freedom.
This is far more important to me than cheap, fast confirmations.
Besides, I have no problem with increasing transaction capacity and decreasing transaction costs through the implementations of a second layer(s) which is perfectly compatible with the above.
I'm not convinced that the people who complain about the cost of transactions (I think they are ridiculously cheap considering the utility the provide) are the type of people who care about the benefits a full node provides. The fact that comparisons are often made to centralized services (VISA, PayPal) which are nothing like Bitcoin is a prime example.
Also, I spent a lot of time and effort in the past warning about the problems that will arise due to mining pools, and did everything I could to promote p2pool, but it's pretty clear that ship has already sailed (p2pool still exists but it never got the type of support it needed to thrive). In my experience,
miners hash rate providers are generally near-sighted, care little about the health of the network or the long term viability of Bitcoin, and are only there to make a quick buck in fiat profits. I'm not exactly keen on handing more control over to their bosses (actual miners, aka pool operators).
only the newbies try to compare bitcoin to VISA ( and its understandable why they do, their newbies! i bet a lot of them end up thinking bitcoin sucks because paypal is better, can't blame them they dont "get it" )
I appreciate your point of view, me i'm very "selfish" and i want bitcoin to be very successful, so that i ( any all who joined recently ) may turn a profit(held in BTC of course
)
LN is an unknown and so i want to stay away from it, or at least not bank on its successes.
when I discovered BU's EC blocksize, and I came up with the idea that "a market driven limit will yield a highly efficient TX fee market"
what's good for miners is good for me, and honestly i'm not sure what we're going to do when subsidy runs out.... so IMO creating a fee market which will yield the most Fees total ( by carefully balancing blockspace to Fee-Paying-TX's demand ) is an absolutely vital piece to the puzzle, and i'm very excited to see what BU's EC will do to the fee market; will miner double total TX fees while halving TX cost!? I believe they can!
I dont think BU indented this, the BU guys seem to like my idea, but I think mostly they we're looking to bring the fee market back to where it was in 2011 and keep it there, with 2-4-6 ... MB blocks.
But with BU's model only a few nodes and miners need to see the profit in keeping blocks small to keep them small. so i'm doing my part running my node and setting my EB low.
the BU miners will have to kick my node away every time they try to incress the blocksize
hopefully that + the idea that they will profit by keeping blocks small will keep blocks as small as they can be without hurting adoption.
