It takes a version of Bitcoin that scales to the point that every person on the planet can interact with it directly, to achieve the status that gold once held. To get there requires that bitcoin scales, while maintaining it's decentralized and thus independent nature.
One option to get there is to let the blockchain scale to accommodate everyone, this could look like the following and still be OK...
- ~100 P2P nodes that are independently sponsored and paid for to perform validation (these would be several large institutions such as MIT, remember it only takes 1 node to flag cheating)
- ~10 pools that receive fees from billions of transactions and are located in several regions (or preferably behind tor or something similar)
- ~100,000 small independent miners connected by stratum to pools, the true location of each miner is easily hidden. These miners live off of the massive number of fees generated
Incorrect. It requires 51% of the hashrate to flag cheating. Why do you guys repeatedly forget this Bitcoin 101 lesson?
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Lots of words that only demonstrate you do no understand what you are pontificating about.
Let me try to spell this out in very simple terms for you. Let's say in the future we had 100 full nodes, 10 pools and everyone else used SPV like wallets, and then 99 full nodes together with 9 pools decided to collude in order to cheat and allocate to themselves coins beyond the 21M limit.
In this scenario the corrupt chain would be the longest and yes what is worse is the P2P network would follow the corrupt chain since they are colluding together. Even worse is all bitcoin end-users would not be able to tell this since they only use SPV like wallets.
However as long as there remains one honest full node (let's say an MIT independently funded node, or a libertarian party funded node),
that single honest full node would be able to easily generate concrete evidence of the corrupt transactions and easily present that evidence to the world for everyone to verify for themselves. Since this honest node monitors the network in real time, it could easily flag corruption in real time.
This in turn would expose the fraud and cause the majority of the 100K miners to switch over to an honest pools to rebuild on the valid chain. The pool could even be super honest about it and also include valid transactions from the corrupt chain to protect people not involved.
So yes, it only takes 1 single honest full node to expose to the whole world (including both users and miners) any corruption in the system.
This is the advantage of having every node capable of fully validating every aspect of the blockchain, and why that aspect allows the P2P network to centralize while still providing a robust system.