A question for big blockers

[Common Sense]

Big blockers often claim they are following "satoshis vision" of "p2p cash" as it says on the whitepaper.

Big blockers are OK with nodes being run by datacenters (since it's the only outcome if you want bitcoin to be used at mainstream levels on-chain)

My question is: How can you call such a model "p2p cash", when it has become peer -> corporation (bitmain, or whoever is running an huge node operation + mining) -> peer? In what planet is this peer to peer cash?

You are basically going through an intermediary with both mining and transaction validating monopolies (since you gave away this power to corporations by having big blocks).

A global attacker could easily bribe the main node operators, and coupled with the (already) centralized mining, you have a system that is basically government's bitch, whereas a model of bitcoin running under a conservative blocksize allowing random people to run full validating nodes hidden behind TOR remains censorship resistant.

See the contradiction yet?

[rogerver]

At the extremes, we will see centralization:
1. small layer 1 = high fees, users priced out, usage of layer 1 is controlled by gatekeepers
2. large layer 1 = high cost of validation, users priced out of validation, layer1 is controlled by gatekeepers

Those seem like the two options.
I'm much more interested in a system that anyone can transact on without permission, than one that anyone can validate, but almost no one can actually afford to transact on.

What good is a system that almost no one can afford to transact on?

[Common Sense]

At the extremes, we will see centralization:
1. small layer 1 = high fees, users priced out, usage of layer 1 is controlled by gatekeepers
2. large layer 1 = high cost of validation, users priced out of validation, layer1 is controlled by gatekeepers

Those seem like the two options.
I'm much more interested in a system that anyone can transact on without permission, than one that anyone can validate, but almost no one can actually afford to transact on.

What good is a system that almost no one can afford to transact on?

But you can't transact without permission in a model where both validation and mining are controlled by corporations. You are just counting on the corporations to not censor your transaction.

Yes, you are free to download a wallet, and make a transaction, but same goes for transactions under layer 2. You are also free to do so.

It seems reasonable to me that users must have the power of full validating nodes at hand, because ultimately full validating nodes are what defines what bitcoin is to the user.

By giving up on this power and putting it into the hands of corporations, you are letting a 3rd party to choose what bitcoin is for you. This is a fatal mistake in the long term. Users have 0 power anymore and are basically ruled out of the game theoretical dynamics. And not only this, but you kill the "digital-gold" feature of bitcoin for long term holders.
You might as well use Ripple at that point.

With Bitcoin we have the opportunity to have both a decentralized, long term storage digital gold (expensive to move, because decentralization is not cheap) + trillions of transactions daily offchain, with reasonable levels of decentralization, and backed by an actual decentralized network of nodes at layer 1 that is impossible to shut down, so actually more decentralized than the "2. large layer 1" model.

This model achieves the same as "2. large layer 1" without ruling out users off the game-theory dynamics, and keeps the core of the network safe from global attackers, because no matter what happens in layer 2, it all falls back down to a decentralized network of users running it. All the Lightning Network transaction packages that go into the blockchain, get ultimately validated by users.
Realize the fatal mistake of nodes being only run by corporations: Since those corporations are ultimately subjected by government laws, and they will be forced to disclose the location of all their node-validating buildings, the ENTIRE network can be shut down at any moment, if suddenly governments decide they had enough with bitcoin. Or they could mold it into whatever they want. I don't see how promoting this view isn't absolute nonsense.
Imagine what the value proposition of TOR would be if only corporations were allowed to run nodes.

Also, Lightning Network transactions will be this easy:

https://twitter.com/JackMallers/status/ ... 0777149440

so user experience isn't a problem.

There doesn't seem to be any convincing argument to penalize decentralization at the very core (layer 1) of the network, given that open source payment channel protocols can save us from doing so.

Relevant videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk7nYxTOyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF_ZQ_eijPs

[grabberfish]

Big blockers often claim they are following "satoshis vision" of "p2p cash" as it says on the whitepaper.

Big blockers are OK with nodes being run by datacenters (since it's the only outcome if you want bitcoin to be used at mainstream levels on-chain)

My question is: How can you call such a model "p2p cash", when it has become peer -> corporation (bitmain, or whoever is running an huge node operation + mining) -> peer? In what planet is this peer to peer cash?

You are basically going through an intermediary with both mining and transaction validating monopolies (since you gave away this power to corporations by having big blocks).

A global attacker could easily bribe the main node operators, and coupled with the (already) centralized mining, you have a system that is basically government's bitch, whereas a model of bitcoin running under a conservative blocksize allowing random people to run full validating nodes hidden behind TOR remains censorship resistant.

See the contradiction yet?

Please see Section 8 of the Bitcoin whitepaper, Simplified Payment Verification:

8. Simplified Payment Verification
It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in.

Satoshi was very clear in this vision. Here he is explaining again, back in 2010:

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.

There you have it in the whitepaper and from the horse's mouth.

HTH.