Maybe you remember the dusty old term 'peer-2-peer'?
I got my share of abuse for proposing that it should be deprecated as a sales pitch before it became a total joke since that is the way things are heading.
Well, then we have to get pedantic. Bitcoin was *never* peer-to-peer. A miner technically always sits in the middle, even if the hashing/nodes were perfectly uniformly distributed.
Fair point. Even though when I first compiled the code it had mining software, I'll not argue from that perspective. Probably at a bare minimum everyone would have anticipated some specialization on the mining end of things.
I'll also argue against my thesis in that it would have been a no-brainer to reward the transfer network and verifies (full nodes) if it were considered a desirable thing to have well represented in the network.
Maybe you are right and the whole thing was a pump-n-dump. If so, I'm glad I dumped some already because there is every possibility that many people will be enthusiastic enough about a 'real' Bitcoin to get one going once the original has proven to be a hoax from the get-go.