I remember in 2011 the first mining I did was in the Bitcoin client where you turned it on with a drop-down menu.
I was there.
And no, I don't have tons and tons of Bitcoin for many reasons. One of which was the pizza man, Laszlo had already released his GPU miner.
But I disagree that Satoshi's lack of understanding of the advent of ASICs meant his words about large groups being responsible for the full nodes was somehow different.
And as I'm sure you've heard the accusations coming towards the XBT crowd that this argument is the same one that Craig Wright used, and that is correct.
I see more granularity in the importance of what a node is. I do not accept the premise that only mining nodes are really nodes, for example.
Also, they're just simply never would be a world in which everyone is running a full node with mining turned on. That can't happen. And it could never have happened, just from a game theory perspective. People naturally look for advantages, and some people have access to resources that others do not. Electricity prices, renewable energy, ASICS, it goes on and on.
I think Satoshi's comment about users just being users was implicitly stating that there would be some trust in the network.
The trick is, there just need to be enough people doing the proof of work, and the node running to keep the network honest, to keep the consensus right and not to game the system.
It would never and could never be a black and white situation.
