How do you maintain the promise of so called "peer to peer cash" to scale globally without centralizing the network due huge blocks that people cannot afford to run at home, therefore not anymore peer to peer cash but peer to corporation to peer transaction? (aka what we have already in the current baking system)
I'm amazed that this point is repeated over and over, and I've been arguing, demonstrating, proving.... that there's no *power* to be had in running a full node that is not a mining node. There is *information* to be had when running a full node: indeed, if you want to *verify yourself* what the system is doing *but without any means to act on it*, you can run a full node. But that's informational, and is not a matter of power.
I'm amazed that people always put forward the "decentralization aspect" of full nodes, while Satoshi himself explained from the very beginning:
1) that the consensus system is Proof of Work, especially to avoid "proof of node" simply because that would be open to Sybil attacks, and as such, nullifying the decision power of non-mining full nodes ON PURPOSE. PoW was introduced exactly for that !
2) that if the block chain becomes very succesfull, only people mining new coins need to run a full node, and that other users can use their light wallets to connect to them.
So, concerning the decentralization of bitcoins consensus mechanism, there's absolutely no use for non-mining full nodes. As an individual power user, you may want to check for yourself whether bitcoin is still working how they told you it was working, and invest in a full node - but the only thing you will get out of that is *information* ; you cannot INFLUENCE bitcoin that way.
I've argued this very logical point, nobody has ever countered it, and it is fairly obvious from the writings of its creator that non-mining full nodes have no consensus power at all.
In other words, your permissionlessness, and your ability to transact peer-to-peer are totally INDEPENDENT of whether there are a lot of non-mining full nodes or not, because ALL THAT is decided by the consensus of miners. The protocol they agreed upon to build the block chain, is the de facto protocol of bitcoin, and they decide if they include your transaction or not. You don't need full nodes to transmit them your transaction: if you connect DIRECTLY to their nodes, they will get it. And that was how bitcoin was designed ! Consensus is decided by those who deliver proof of work and explicitly NOT by the number of full nodes.
It is rather strange that one argues that the peer-to-peer ability to pay is compromised because Joe cannot run his full node in his basement any more (while this node never intervened in any consensus decision). but that the peer-to-peer ability would NOT be compromised by needing a lot of hubs in the LN network to agree to your transaction: hubs to which you are TIED with a payment channel which you cannot settle easily (as per definition that the on chain system is "compromised" and doesn't have, per design, the capacity for you to easily settle). Being forced off-chain looks to me like a much higher danger to the peer-to-peer permissionlessness of transactions, than having to rely on the consensus of Proof-of-work providers only.
The current, actual reality is that all of bitcoins' consensus, including the protocol, the permission to transact, the fees, and everything, are the consensus that happens between about 20 entities, the pools, that together, have more than 99% of the decision power (PoW) under their control. The consensus that emerges between these 20 entities is what we call "bitcoin", and bitcoin was designed to be like that.