Right, and Bitcoin having so many non-pruned nodes is perfect for a monetary base layer. There will always be those of us who choose to do this. But to do anything else on Bitcoin (mine, build wallets, further secure Bitcoin) a puned node is just fine.
My example above is more about an L2 that can be a little less decentralized, but perfectly secure for a majority of people- with the scalability and privacy Bitcoin needs to compete with fiat.
"Having so many non-pruned nodes" is an overstatenent. With the growth of bitcoin we would need a lot lot more. and where centralization creeps in, it is difficult to remove it.
Yes, that would be ideal. But it seems counterproductive to discourage people from running a pruned node.
The only difference between a pruned and non-pruned node is the non-pruned can bootstrap others. This is important for something like nuclear war. If the US, China, and Russia destroy each other, but there’s one non-pruned node in Antarctica, this is enough to restart the entire network. That makes Bitcoin indestructible.
A hundred non-pruned nodes in Miami is great, but it doesn’t do a lot more than having one non-pruned and 999 pruned nodes.
But bootstrapping is really important. So if someone messes with that, it is a big deal.
And also, the data traffic still has to be sent over the internet. Which brings costs etc.
Absolutely. Bitcoin should be small and slow, to ensure the network is indestructible.
But Bitcoin like this cannot scale. The Bitcoin Cashers wanted to trade some of this indestructibility for scalability. That’s unacceptable for a money that powers the entire world.
On layer twos, this would be fine. There is nothing more decentralizing than PoW, and less non-pruned nodes with millions of pruned nodes, backed by the absolute indestructibility of Bitcoin, is a small trade to fix Bitcoin’s scalability and privacy issues.
