You are right about incentives. But there is something else. PoW mining is an economic activity. You have capex, you have opex, almost all your profits are burned in your huge costs, and you have to care about efficiency in order to stay in the game. And in any economic activity, you have economy of scale. As your mining farm gets bigger, it becomes more efficient and stands better against the competition. You get volume discounts for miners, you will be the first in line for the new generation of miners, you can get cheaper electricity when you buy wholesale, it becomes worthwhile to relocate to a more favorable location, and you can hire the best talent in the industry. It doesn't matter if the PoW algorithm is ASICable or not, the economy of scale is universal. It might be not very important in the growing market when everyone, even a smaller and weaker miner, gets a portion of the growing pie, but nothing lasts forever and as the market matures and gets more competitive, the weaker players are darwinized, and the hash power gets concentrated in the hands of a few bigger miners. Miners, not mining pools. This looks like an end-game of any PoW based blockchain, because it has a heavy "hook" into the economy, and the economy favors scale. You can call it emergent centralization. Incidentally, Byteball moves in the opposite direction.
Bitcoin is not run by miners, it's run by a community. (If miners were in charge, we would have big blocks right now.)
This in the beauty and strength of bitcoin. It is multi-leveled, > full nodes, miners, devs and community all able to check each other and keeping each other honest.
I like byteball as a concept but critisism must be taken seriously if you want to improve.
Imo, not being able to run a Byteball full node on a desktop computer is a massive problem.
What you are saying it totally true about the community. Yes, there is not only miners, but miners have the upper hand.
You say that without full nodes there would be bigger blocks, but you are forgetting that BCH is still alive. We don't know if it ever take over BTC, but the ball is rolling.
I guess people are already starting to forget empty or full blocks and $50 transaction fees too. Your full node is useless without the block producers.
And it is not only weaker miners who get darwinized, weaker full nodes too because not everybody can keep up with the growing size of the blockchain, especially Ethereum, which grows crazy fast. Big miners doesn't mind about bigger blockchain, they have to run a full node either way. Mass adoption happens with light clients, not with full nodes.
It is great that community has still some power over miners, but it could be what dooms Bitcoin if it takes so long to adopt SegWit and Lightning or whatever sharding method is needed in the future to scale full nodes. If it takes Ethereum for another 2 years for that, I wonder how much it will take for Bitcoin.
On Byteball, there is no empty blocks because there is no blocks and it doesn't matter how much you pay for fees, your transactions will be confirmed in 5-15 minutes. Even faster the more popular it gets. And once it is confirmed, it will be final, no way to rewrite it. Also, Byteball has evolved so much in past 2 years that when it finally actually needs layer-2 solutions or sharding then these improvements can be introduced more easily because if the witnesses don't agree with it then they can be replaced with those who do (gradually, giving the other witnesses the time to re-think).