Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.
Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.
There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.
Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.
Having a decent wallet would help too. Switched to Electrum today, I really got sick of of the QT-wallet fucking up the block-index, verifying stuff for no apparent reason and for looking fugly while doing it. I never could wrap my head around why not more energy was put into a more sexy looking and properly working wallet... Except I understand a lot of ppl think the end user is not that important, BTC was designed purely for either tech nerds or speculators, buying a cup of coffee and running a cool wallet at home is supposed to be done with other crypto's like DASH?
Electrum is not a full node ....
Exactly. I'd love to run a full node and did for a while, but Bitcoin QT just sucks ass. More energy should be put into developing a wallet that is also a full node, which would make it nice to run instad of a pain.
You're complaining about it validating, well a full node needs to validate. Electrum does not so you're not comparing fairly.
Have you tried running bitcoind headless?
Haven't, will look into it, thx.
I have a better suggestion, run bitcoind headless and mSIGNA.
Have mSIGNA connect to your local bitcoind node (is the default) ... mSIGNA is as good as (imo better than Armory) enterprise level SPV wallet but since you connect to your own local node you get full node security (and privacy if bitcoind set-up right). mSIGNA has multi-sig, HD seed back-ups, separate accounts and few other slick wallet bits and piece.