If there was an allocation to node running as proposed, it would help. Since nodes are needed for mining, it was envisioned that the mining rewards would do this.
In economic solutions to avoid centralization, look for the Nash equilibrium and to avoid solutions with advantages weighted toward incumbency. Justusranvier has a pretty well reasoned description of what that might look like.
The article looks like warmed over Mike Hearn vomit from back when he was talking 'assurity bonds' or some such nonsense to justify getting rid of the block size limitation. He just didn't couch his argument in wall-to-wall libertarian hucksterism. To bad for him else it might have worked even back in 4 years ago when the 'crisis' existed much as it does today.
Justus's brilliance is that he sheds complexity by simply ignoring it. Much like solving an algebraic expression by simply striking off any terms which contain radicals or other complexity. And it works like a charm here on trolltalk.
The trouble is that we don't have 'free markets' and have no path to get there. We live in the real world, and in what passes for 'free markets' that we have Bitcoin is pretty certain to arrive at an end-state represented by pretty much any other similar-ish solution. PayPal, e-mail, etc. The global internet's hold on it's claim as a free medium of information exchange has undergone significant regressions and is tenuous at best and certainly not solid enough to base a meaningful disruptive monetary system on.
Creating a market for node running would not be a bad thing, if done with incentives favoring distribution in the design. TBF has a sort of small incentive program going:
https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/incentive/It is an off-network incentive, so maybe we'll see what happens with it..
Ha! This is as funny as a crutch! After years of doing everything possible to get rid of the pesky P2P nature of Bitcoin, TBF is just realizing why it is important and is doing a minor about-face. Just long enough to get their exponential growth fork in though.