Again: The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".
Basically you can't reply to the simple question of "who is going to run a node for these financial institutions?". Gotcha.
And you keep talking about keeping the blockchain decentralized? What a joke you are.
Financial institutions may run their own nodes, hire a specialist, or use SPV. The point, for the sake of the network remaining diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient, is to maintain the option of "really" (IE trustlessly) using Bitcoin for anyone with a $300 laptop and 1Mb upstream.
Who cares if they use laptops or big servers?The broader point is that Bitcoin grants anyone with such a laptop and pipe the (revolutionary) option of being their own (disruptive) financial institution.
That no one can't really use anyway because it is either A. Too costly or B. Transactions get never confirmed. Absent a crackdown or other type of crisis, most people will simply "benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain."
But if there were a crackdown or other crisis, we must ensure that ~everyone is economically and technologically able to "write into the holy ledger." Irrelevant to the question.Competitive fees have never failed to get their transactions confirmed. If they did fail, then Bitcoin isn't working the way it's supposed to. But that's never happened.
Servers cost more than laptops. Requiring an expensive server/pipe to operate a full contributing node would violate Bitcoin's core principle of giving ~everyone the option to act as their own financial institution, and damage the network's diversity/diffuseness/defensibility/resiliency.
BTC fees are still orders of magnitude lower than trivial, especially given the exceedingly valuable magical/revolutionary technology those sub-trivial fees grant access to. As fees rise, they simply exclude marginal cases like gambling/spam/tips/coffee/paywalls.
That's a good thing. And there's plenty of room for them off-chain or on alt/side chains.
Bitcon's survivability is never "irrelevant to the question." Bitcon's survivability is central to the answer of every question.
That you feel survivability is "irrelevant" demonstrates you simply don't understand Bitcoin, and would perhaps be happier with an Android app for Paypal, Visa, or Square.
The difference between bad and well-developed digital cash will determine whether we have a dictatorship or a real democracy. -
David Chaum 1996The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small. Fight Features. -
Andy Tanenbaum 2004Technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months. -
Phil Zimmerman 2013Resiliency, not efficiency, is the paramount goal of decentralized, non-state sanctioned currency -
Jon Matonis 2015