Then I would debate that the statement, "allowing it to scale to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second without impacting fault tolerance or decentralization", is u true.
The actual effect on fault tolerance and decentralization has to be put into context that currently over 50% of Bitcoin's hashpower comes from only 4 pools. As BlockReduce scales the node requirements to have a node which does partial state validation would be much less then a if Bitcoin scaled in its current state.
That would mean that although there may be fewer people validating full state, there will be more people, and fewer pools validating partial state. I would argue that having partially validating mining nodes is advantageous over having a deminimis number of pools. Having smaller economic entities decide on the fate of the protocol rather than a few large pools would be positive for the ecosystem.
Is to REALLY scale out the network is = more
partially validating nodes, but fewer fully validating nodes?
That goes the opposite path of what you said below. Or might I have misunderstood?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5060909.msg53240986#msg53240986Yes, scaling the network is adding more network participants, this is accomplished through scaling.
More participants partially validating, which won't be part of the whole network, and less participants fully validating is centralizing, making the network smaller. It is anti-scaling.
The requirement that all market participants be fully validating nodes is a flaw not a virtue. BlockReduce allows a larger number of incrementally more expensive ways of participating in the network while also scaling.
?
Growing node requirements/costs would only make node count go down, not up. Block Reduce might increase transaction throughput, but it's centralizing.