Quote from: Wind_FURY on August 03, 2018, 06:11:05 AM

Quote from: Zin-Zang on August 02, 2018, 07:03:51 AM

In the end the Merchants hold the economic power as they are the ones accepting or refusing the transactions as payment for their services or products.
Number of non-mining nodes are irrelevant. One is as good as a billion , as long as you can access the one and trust it.
All they do is verify the same entry, so how many times , would you need someone to tell you 2+2=4 over & over again before you believe them.
The Merchants are trusting whichever crypto service node, they are using, so multiple merchants are all trusting Coinbase's non-mining node and caring little about what the other nodes report, such as the one in your basement.

But are the users not a part of the economic majority? Was the failure of 2X not a lesson that the users can also impose themselves on the network?

Plus what is the difference of the nodes from the other nodes' point of view? They all validate and relay transcations and blocks if valid. Nodes do not care if it is a mining node, a merchant's node, or a node in a basement.

Users are Users, they only have an effect on the economic power, when they buy or sell bitcoins.
Unless they are buying or selling in the millions per day, their effect on the economics is too small to notice.
Merchants have a greater effect on economic power because of the higher % , that flows thru them.

All of the Merchants using Coinbase , are not running their own node, they are using Coinbase's node and completely trusting coinbase to maintain it ,
they are not even hooked up to the bitcoin network so they could care less what your basement node is doing.

Example:
I have never ran a bitcoin node, because their is no financial incentive for me to do so. (No interest or transaction fees earned)
I gain nothing from keeping a bitcoin wallet maintained and synced and instead use the exchange's wallet to hold my bitcoins and letting their node be the arbiter.
Am I giving up some security because of this , sure. But the additional security is not worth it to me , as I don't hold bitcoin as a store of value but only use it as a payment network when required. I also never break the cardinal rule: Never leave more coins sitting on a single exchange than what you are willing to lose.
Most Merchants are the same as they immediately convert to fiat to avoid fluctuations in btc price verses fiat, because the input costs to run their business are in fiat not crypto.

Quote from: Wind_FURY on August 03, 2018, 06:11:05 AM

But if there are too few non-mining full nodes then it would be easier for the miners to "Sybilize" their way to change the rules, is it not?

Sorry to butt in jbreher, I'll leave you guys to your conversation after this.

Sybil attacks
1. can refuse to relay transactions and slow down block propagation to other nodes.
2. can isolate your node from the network and block you from syncing with the network.
3. can in some rare cases cause you to run on a temporary fork.
(In which case, transactions won't match the rest of the network.
Monitoring a trusted 3rd party block explorer that it block height matches your node is a easy way to block sybil attack.)

(Including addnodes in your conf file to a few trusted IPs, blocks Sybil attacks 2 & 3)

Sybil attacks can not change the program code on my node therefore they can not change the rules of the network.
IE: They can't change hard coded things like block size or block speed or anything that my node program code will reject.