You fail because you are trying to make points that are not valid to real world situations.
If a single miner did come about, than Bitcoin is done and everyone goes to a new coin.
So this example is worthless.
I hope you see all the contradictions in your attempt at argument. The single miner was YOUR example to demonstrate that decentralization came from the nodes, not from the miners. I took your premise to show you how that argument was totally flawed. Now you start saying that it is not "real world". No, but it is the perfect illustration of what I was saying: centralisation is mining centralization.
Now, you even admit that in your perfectly decentralized network with one miner, bitcoin would be dead. So you just admitted the point for which you called me a moron.
What you stated in your first post, is not what I stated.
You are stating that nodes that do not mine have no significance.
Yes that is what I'm stating. There are a few cases, when there are network connection problems, where these nodes do play a small role, but that's it.
It is amazing how much this myth that node count has some significance in a Proof of Work system to COUNTER node count influence, is living on. I think it is because if people would acknowledge that in a proof of work system, the votes are with hash rate, they would see the obvious centralization going on in bitcoin. So one continues to spread this silly idea that node count has any "voting" meaning, while proof of work was explicitly introduced to counter that.
If you were correct in your IDEA, then what is occurring within Bitcoin, would not right now.
We would have all hardforked long ago, if you are correct.
No, because the only guys that can hardfork, are miners. At least, as long as PoW is valid. Bitcoin COULD hardfork with the nodes/users only, if someone implemented a PoS system. THEN the miners don't decide anything any more. PoS is a way to give power to the nodes/stakeholders. But PoW doesn't care the smallest bit about nodes.
BTW "consensus by proof of work" was defined when miners and validators will a single entity.
Your definition of it, stop apply to Bitcoin when GPUs and ASICs came about.
No. Your IDEA that consensus was "the majority of the community" was equivalent to "consensus of proof of work" stopped being valid at that point, and what remained was "proof of work" and NOT "majority of community". In other words, the failed attempt of Satoshi to use "proof of work" as a means of "consensus of community" is what you are talking about, but what effectively is valid, is proof of work. And if the proof of work is centralized, everything is centralized, and the rest doesn't matter. The non-mining nodes don't matter. They are simply proxy servers of the chain made by the miners, nothing more.
I disagree entirely.
If you are correct, clients like BU would not have needed to be created.
The fact that they were designed to do what they do, proves you incorrect.
On the contrary. BU or any other software would of course be needed BY MINER NODES to have NOT the segwit software that would activate segwit automatically if signalling to one another. In fact, JUST ANY form of software that is not segwit signalling would be needed, and that sticks to the old protocol. What Joe Sixpack runs on his PC without mining, nobody cares. Apart from the fact that one doesn't want to piss off Joe Sixpack so much, that he doesn't want to buy new miner coins any more at high price.
Your whole argument and premise is based on a twisting of reality.
At one point you say second layers are bad because of centralizing nature.
and just now you are saying miners are already centralized today. LOol.
Yes, miners are already quite centralized, but not entirely. There is not yet a SINGLE mining pool, or sufficient COLLUDING mining pools under the leadership of a cartel. Bitcoin is an oligarchy of about 10 deciders. Not yet a kingdom with one decider. LN will be the same, or worse.
Centralization is unavoidable when there needs to be done an effort to obtain rewards, by economies of scale. With mining, those economies have been at work and have established an oligarchy, but as long as these oligarchs dispute, we can consider it still a little bit "decentralized". LN has almost PROPORTIONAL economies of scale wrt the invested collateral. It will centralize way, way faster.