Thought experiment:

How can we 10X the number of bitcoin nodes running in a distributed, trustless way?

Turnkey software solutions make it easy for people to set up a node but the hardware is often overpriced and overhyped, while the software provides a central point of capture (What do you do if your Raspbery Pi Node Software Provider goes rogue and auto-updates all their users to an evil fork?)

So I’m toying with the idea of mad market devices with the bitcoin software burned into the hardware in a write-once way. Nodes can’t be upgraded remotely since it’s basically an ASIC for a particular version of the consensus model.

But how can you trust the hardware to truly be write-once and/or not have a backdoor? How can you allow updates for auxiliary software like Tor and Electrum?

Thoughts?

Or is it just a solution in search of a problem?