It would seem the former of these two options was envisiged by the creator at the time. Nodes centralising around well connected mining nodes and bitcoin service providers, and users using SPV wallets.
Yes, but there is one problem that is a constant misunderstanding in the
whole Bitcoin community.
When this belief was stated by Satoshi, Nodes were a single entity.
The miners were validators and the validators were miners.
There was only one. Now, there are two separate systems.
Due to these two separate systems, there are two possible choices now.
Satoshi's original comments (as to Nodes) no longer apply to today's reality.
I don't think the fact that not all nodes are mining nodes changes the fundamental premise. In fact it strengthens it as there are more validation nodes.
No, you missed my point. I thought it was more evident.
Non-mining nodes are not incentivized the way Miners Nodes are.
The point being:
both can have opposite votes now (two sides), instead of the vote
always tending toward the same incentivized choice by Hardfork.
Now there are more possibilities such as Softforks. (User activated
fork is now another one, but is a new theory which is riskier than
either soft or hard.)
All I'm saying is when you cite Satoshi about Nodes, it was before
the Node split and is entirely in a different context that no longer
exists.