On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 6:06 PM, Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

You make a logical fallacy;

I would agree that nodes are there for people to stop trusting someone that
they have no trust-relationship with.

Yay, trust!

But your conclusion that low node count is an indication that its hard to run
one discards your own point. You forget the point that running a node is only
needed if you don't know anyone you can trust to run it for you. I'm pretty
darn sure that this will have a bigger effect on nodecount than how hard it
is.

I never said it is the only factor that influences node count.

Or, in other words, without a need to run a node you can't judge the
difficulty of why there aren't more running.

If the incentives for running a node don't weight up against the cost/difficulty using a full node yourself for a majority of people in the ecosystem, I would argue that there is a problem. As Bitcoin's fundamental improvement over other systems is the lack of need for trust, I believe that with increased adoption should also come an increased (in absolute terms) incentive for people to use a full node. I'm seeing the opposite trend, and that is worrying IMHO.

--

Pieter