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part of me feels all this, node count, minning in china, bitcoin "centraliztion", is all completely over stated. sure its important to maintain a certain level of decentralization, but I dont think we are anywhere close to a dangerous situation.
but ya building in some incentives that promote decentralization can't hurt.
Yep, there seems to be some empirical difficulties in the bitcoin space in term of being able to measure exactly the mining and who are the miners, etc, etc.
It seems to be kind of like a catch 22 in that it is difficult to measure exactly who are all the miners and to ensure that some of them are not collaborating in order to destroy bitcoin.
I would like to see full-nodes have more weight when it comes to choosing which new features get adopted
they did this thing which allows minning to express there willingness / readiness for any particular BIP.
they should allow full-nodes to do the same thing.
I thought that attempting to accomplish something like this increased the likelihood for sybil attacks, and if so, how can you weight the votes properly if some rich folks are out their trying to imitate nodes as if they are real people?
i guess its already like that, i could choose to run BitcoinUnlimited, and there by express my willingness to accept bigger blocks. but idk I just dont FEEL it would make any difference.
Probably in the current state it may not make a lot of difference to run BU. Probably, more effectively would be figuring out ways that maybe some other cryptos are able to better allow for governance and or input to be more balanced and to figure out ways in which to incorporate some of those mechanisms into bitcoin in order that, for example, too much centralization ends up taking over bitcoin.
Some of this will likely evolve with time and monitoring, and surely we continue to hope for decent developments, including issues in which prices are controlled by quasi-centralized exchanges, and maybe there are continuing solutions being proposed to make more decentralized abilities/mechanisms to establish BTC prices.