this is why perhaps POS/Peercoin may have an advantage.
Running a node costs less, so it could become much more distributed.
Eg as raspberry pi.
2000$ in peercoin guarantees hardware costs in about 2 years.
there is no such guarantee with asics infact quite the opposite.
You might be onto something. However, peercoin will never get to the place where Bitcoin is. The market cap was at a level similar to the one before the spike in 2013 just 2 months back. It might get another chance if we go into another bubble phase, but that's about it. One can usually find a few potentially useful features if we look at certain altcoins, however Bitcoin is what it is.
I guess running a node at home shouldn't be a problem for people who have unlimited bandwidth?
Proof of stake was an idea put forward by Gavin to Satoshi in order to solve the issue of people creating scripts and endlessly sending transactions to themselves at zero cost in fees or something along those lines.
Bitcoin has something built in that still does something along the lines of proof of stake. I'll have to hunt around for the reference.
Anyway.....there was a paper that said PoS coins needed to use a centralized reference node: