They cannot honestly and openly admit "yes we want to change Bitcoin from Satoshi's peer to peer cash into a settlement network" because it would be so radical that it would have a high probability of getting backlash from the community. Therefore, they have opted to be sneaky about it.
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)
Satoshi's vision was that eventually, when the network gets large, only miners need to run full nodes. Ordinary users can use SPV clients.
As the network gets larger, running a full node will become more expensive, but please realize that:
A) part of that cost will be offset by the natural decline in processing and bandwidth costs.
and...
B) By that time, Bitcoin network will be so big that it will still be very decentralized even if the cost barriers to mining increase.
You can have a different opinion than Satoshi, but I find it very suspicious that those who do aren't forthright about it.
For about "satoshis" vision and focus on the facts.
Fact: If you raise the blocksize up to a point where people can't run their own nodes, you cannot call it a peer to peer network anymore.
Fact: if the entire consensus mechanism as it was designed, is decided by 20 entities, it is not a peer-to-peer CONSENSUS SYSTEM any more. And that it the current reality.
Bitcoin is not about peer-to-peer communication (like, say, the Tor network). Bitcoin is not about communication on top of the internet. Bitcoin is about building a secured ledger of transactions according to consensus deciders, deciding what is the actual list of past transactions.
Well, that list is about ENTIRELY decided by 20 entities.
That's bitcoin's reality. So there's not much peer-to-peer any more. Yes, the peer-to-peer part is between these 20 entities. The rest is just a communication network that doesn't serve much of a purpose: whether I send my transaction through 8 hops from P2P to one of these 20 entities, or whether I send it directly with TCP/IP to them, doesn't alter much apart from some anonymity aspects, and then I can use true P2P networks such as Tor to obtain the same.
In the end, my transaction has to be accepted by one of these 20 entities, written in the unique block chain these 20 entities produce, and my counter party has to get it from them (directly, or through a proxy server-full-node) to see that my payment got accepted, confirmed, and written into the unique eternal ledger, produced by these 20 entities.
I don't see what's peer-to-peer in that system.
You have a consortium of 20 ledger-producers on one hand, and an army of customers (the users) on the other hand.