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It's a political assessment. Full nodes are the ultimate arbiters of consensus.
That's not true unless miners are thought of as the identical to nodes, which is has not been true for nearly 4 years now. Nodes arbitrating a consensus the BU theory - that nodes can restrain miners - but it doesn't work. If miners were forked off from nonminers, the miner network could keep their blockchain operational under attack from the nodes far better than nodes could keep their blockchain operational under attack from the miners. The miners could effectively grind the node network to a complete halt and probably still run their own fork unimpeded at the same time. This would continue until the the lack of faith in the network drove the miners out of business economically, or until the node network capitulated and followed the rules of the miner network.
The reason BU isn't a dire threat is that there's a great rift between the miners just like there is between the average users, just as satoshi intended, and that rift gives the user network the economic edge.
> If home users are not running their own full nodes, then home users have to trust and rely on other, more powerful nodes to represent them. Of course, the more powerful nodes, simply by nature of having more power, are going to have different opinions and objectives from the users.
I think you're conflating mining with node operation here. Node users only power is to block the propagation of certain things. Since miners also have a node endpoint, they can cut the node users out of the equation by linking with eachother directly - something they already do out of practicality for propagation. Node users do not have the power to arbitrate consensus, that is why we have blocks and PoW.
> And it's impossible for 5000 nodes to properly represent the views of 5,000,000 users. Users running full nodes is important to prevent political hijacking of the Bitcoin protocol. [..] that changes you are opposed to are not introduced into the network.
This isn't true. Non-miner nodes cannot produce blocks. Their opinion is not represented in the blockchain in any way, the blockchain is entirely made up of blocks. They can commit transactions, but the transactions must follow an even stricter set of rules and short of a user activated PoW change, the miners get to decide. It might be viable for us to introduce ways for transactions to vote on things, but that also isn't nodes voting - that's money voting.
Bitcoin is structured such that nodes have no votes because nodes cannot be trusted. They don't inherently represent individuals, they don't inherently represent value, and they don't commit work that is played against eachother to achieve a game theory equilibrium. That's miners.
> This statement is not true for home users, it is true for datacenter nodes. For home users, 200 GB of bandwidth and 500 GB of bandwidth largely have the exact same cost.
Your assumption is predicated upon the idea that users pay a fixed cost for any volume of bandwidth. That assertion is true for some users but not true for others, and it is becoming exceedingly less true in recent years with the addition of bandwidth caps by many ISP's. Even users without a bandwidth cap can often get a very threatening letter if they were to max their connection 24/7. Assuming unlimited user bandwidth in the future and comparing that with limited datacenter bandwidth is extremely short sighted. Fundamentally, if market forces have established that datacenter bandwidth costs $0.09 per GB, what makes you think that ISP's don't have to deal with the same limitations? They do, the difference is that $0.09 per GB times the total usage across the ISP's customer base is far, far lower than $80 times the number of customers. The more that a small group of customers deviating wildly becomes a problem for them, the more they will add bandwidth caps or send threatening letters or even rate-limit or stop serving those users.
Without that assumption, your math and examples fall apart - Bandwidth costs for full archival nodes are nearly 50 times higher than storage costs no matter whether they are at home or in a datacenter.
> The financials of home nodes follow a completely different math than the costs you are citing by quoting datacenter prices.
No, they really aren't without your assumption. Yes, they are somewhat different - If someone has a 2TB hard drive but only ever uses 40% of it, the remaining hard drive space would have a cost of zero. Those specific examples break down when you average over several years and fifty thousand users. If that same user was running a bitcoin node and hard drive space was indeed a concern, they would factor that desire into the purchase of their next computer, preferring those with larger hard drives. That reintroduces the cost with the same individual who had no cost before. The cost difference doesn't work out to the exact same numbers as the datacenter costs, who have a better economy of scale but also have profit and business overhead, but all of the math I've done indicates that over thousands of individuals and several years of time, the costs land in the same ballpark. For example - Comcast bandwidth cap = 1000gb @ ~$80/month. $0.08/GB. Amazon's first tier is currently $0.09. Much closer than I even expected before I worked out the math. I'm open to being proven wrong.
> 0.14 uses more than 1 GB of RAM.
I'm running 0.13.2 and only see 300 mb of ram. Why is 0.14 using three times the ram?
> 1GB I think is really the limit you'd want to have before you'd start seeing users choose not to run nodes simply
Again, while I sympathize with the concept, I don't believe holding the growth of the entire currency back based on minimum specs is a fair tradeoff. The impact on usecases that depend on a given fee level is total obliteration. That's unavoidable for things like microtransactions, but a fee level of $1/tx allows for hundreds of opportunities that a fee level of $100/tx does not. That difference may be the deciding factor in the network effect between Bitcoin and a competitor altcoin. Bitcoin dying out because a better-operated coin steals its first-mover advantage is just as bad as bitcoin dying out because an attacker halted tx propagation and killed the network. Probably even worse - First mover advantages are almost never retaken, but the network could recover from a peering attack with software changes and community/miner responses.
> However, I think the fees would have to get in the $50 range for that to start to be the case.
I calculated this out. If blocksizes aren't increased, but price increases continue as they have in the last 3-5 years, per-node operational costs for one month drop from roughly $10-15ish (using datacenter numbers, which you said would be higher than home user numbers and might very well be when amortized thoroughly) down to $5-8 in less than 8 years. If transaction fees don't rise at all due to blockspace competition (i.e., they offset only the minimum required for miners to economically protect Bitcoin), they'll be above $10 in less than 4 years. I believe that comparing 1-month of node operational costs versus 1 transaction fee is a reasonable, albeit imperfect, comparison of when users will stop caring.
That's not very far in the future at all, and fee-market competition will probably be much, much worse for us and better for miners.
> When talking about emergency funds - that is, $10k+ that you keep in case your government defaults, hyperinflates, seizes citizen assets, etc. etc. (situations that many Bitcoin users today have to legitimately worry about),
So I don't mean to be rude here, but this kind of thinking is very poor logic when applied to anyone who isn't already a libertarian Bitcoin supporter. By anyone outside the Bitcoin world's estimation, Bitcoin is an extremely high risk, unreliable store of value. We like to compare it to "digital gold" because of the parameters that Satoshi chose, but saying it does not make it true. For someone not already a believer, Bitcoin is a risky, speculative investment into a promising future technology, and gold is a stable physical asset with 4,000 years of acceptance history that has the same value in nearly every city on the planet. Bitcoin is difficult to purchase and difficult to find someone to exchange for goods or services.
Could Bitcoin become more like what you described in the future? A lot of us hope so or we wouldn't be here right now. But in the meantime, any other crypto currency that choses parameters similar to gold could eclipse Bitcoin if we falter. If their currency is more usable because they balance the ratio of node operational costs/security versus transaction fees/usability, they have a pretty reasonable chance of doing so. And then you won't store your $10k+ in bitcoin, you'll store in $altcoin. The market doesn't really care who wins.
> We are two orders of magnitude away from this type of fee pressure, so I think it continues to make sense to be considering the home nodes as the target that we want to hit.
That's nothing, we've never had any fee competition at all until basically November of last year. From December to March transaction fees went up by 250%, and they doubled from May to December before that. Transactions per year are up 80% per year for the last 4 years. Things are about to get screwed.