The alternative is to dumb down the entire system to 3 to 7 transactions per second. The notion of such a system working as world money is so ludicrous that it beggars the imagination that anyone would so think.
i agree here. work is needed. it is being done. i may not agree with some of it but stuff is happening regardless.
i've scaled back my hopes for bitcoin as some sort of global currency for this reason. i don't think we were being realistic in the early days about the security trade-offs of high transaction throughput.
my biggest concern is actually not the decline of full nodes, but that the hard cap on money supply combined with insufficient mining fees will break bitcoin's security model. miners are in an arms race to accumulate the mining subsidy. that subsidy is quickly dropping. without a block size limit to drive fee revenue up (to replace the mining subsidy) i don't understand how the incentives prevent massive future declines in hash rate. this exposes the network to attack by previous generations of mining hardware, not to mention the chaos it could cause due to congestion and delayed difficulty adjustments alone.