You seem to fear the inevitable.
Something which is currently prohibited by the rules embodied in every bitcoin node can not be easily described as inevitable.
If Bitcoin is ever to become truly successful, a transaction throughput volume that is well beyond what the average end user is capable of, or willing to, committing the resources to maintain a full client must occur.
A fair amount of debuking this has already happened in the thread. There are sound fundamental technical reasons why Bitcoin cannot be fully successful without external (decenteralized if you like) transaction handling. Once you have that, there isn't obviosuly a need for an extreme capacity (beyond millions/day) in bitcoin itself.
There is no point in crying about this, it has already begun. I dont run a full client anymore, myself.
Kind of an odd comment. A rasberry pi significantly less powerful than most current smartphones can keep up with the blockchain with current software. Modulo software bugs and inadequacies the computing hardware and storage I already own would be adequate for a hundred years of the current maximum rate of Bitcoin (though I tend to be a bit overpowered).
While it's important that the blockchain be replicated many places across the Internet, and into the deep web such as Tor, there comes a point of rapidly dimminishing returns. I think that we have around 10K full nodes that can be identified
There are about 20k IPv4 _listening_ nodes enumerated in the seeds database, but it's impossible to know how many full nodes there are, though its very likely that its substantially more than the number we can see listening.
There must be some degree of centralization, as the bitcoin network as it presently exists is too costly relative to it's current market size. We don't want the network to get smaller, really, but nor do we need it to grow more; we simply need the market to outgrow the network until the relative costs of running the netowrk are much lower than now
The cost of running a node relative to the value to the Bitcoin economy isn't actually a factor in decenteralization. The problem is that no matter how valuable the bitcoin economy is you can always save the cost of validating it by letting (hoping) someone else handles it. What matters is the absolute cost relative to current technology and keeping it low enough that you get diversity and decentralization through indifference and altruism. If you depend on profit motives you end up with a tragedy of the commons because its easier to freeload, or easier to monetize dishonest behavior. The system doesn't have any real incentives for honestly validating except the vague "if no one does a good job of it, the whole house of cards collapses".
Eventually, a live transaction on the main netowrk should become an uncommon event, relative to the number of off-network transactions that occur.
Great. Agreed! But that is why some people here are saying that being conservative with Bitcoin itself and keeping the costs low and decentearlization a top priority is the right path: we can have both scale and decenteralization through the use of off-chain trading and keeping the chain small... but if we bloat up the chain so that only some ten thousand central banks validate it, we'll lose decentralization.
