I see this as a laudable ideal. But at best, we can only hope a certain percentage of people will actually do this. There is an enormous portion of people who couldn't, even if they wanted to. So how do these people participate in bitcoin? There have to be compromises. There have to be states that are *good enough*. Satoshi himself predicted this in a post on the Bitcoin Talk Forum around 2010. He predicted that there would come a time where not every person could or would have to run a full node. And that that would fall to large data centers (not quite the buzzword back then). The implication there is there would/should always be enough people who could run full nodes and mine to keep the network distributed enough not to break the whole point of it.

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> But at best, we can only hope a certain percentage of people will actually do this. That’s why the likelihood of Bitcoin succeeding (in separating money from state) are very slim. In 2010’s Satoshi post he was referring to miners. In 2010 miners and nodes were one and the same. At this time he didn’t predict the emergence of Stratum V1 and that it will lead to pool mining where nodes don’t construct their own blocks.
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.
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