Thanks for the responses, I made some points poorly.

With respect to mining, I emphasised it is essential, but warned against granting "miners" some elevated status in this peer to peer network.  If you prefer intermediation and authority derived from an LLM, here:

User
"Bitcoin needs mining, it doesn't need shareholder beholden, profit optimising, large scale commercial miners."

Which is essential to Bitcoin, mining, or the miners described in the excerpt?

"The excerpt criticises large-scale commercial miners who are driven by profit and beholden to shareholders, suggesting that their motives might not align with the decentralised ethos of Bitcoin. However, it acknowledges that mining itself is a crucial component of the Bitcoin network."

https://chat.openai.com/share/b2d841d6-4f05-4c09-80aa-dd54cda02dba

There is no financial reward from running a node, and yet thousands do.  That there may be no profit from mining, there are other benefits from participating in and protecting the network.


"It sounds to me like you are conflating running a Bitcoin node with mining."

No, I'm not, but I wish I could, as Satoshi did in the white paper.  Both a home node and home mining are plug and play at a reducing level of technical chops.  Comparing home hosting to the services of an ISP, primarily connectivity, address allocation and routing (all I use mine for) is a bit of a stretch.

Check out the Apollo from FutureBit.io.  A couple of terahash at 150w and silent enough to sit on the desk with me for 699 USD.  The picture is an hour after it was delivered, and most of the hour was sorting out the display. https://x.com/HamishMacEwan/status/1748186014374404547

A node on a pi also appears, and it's not the single node or single miner that powers a P2P network but the number of participants who adopt the technology for its public good not private profit.

The growing digital uncertainty will require everyone to have a trust node, an anchor of their digital life that is resilient, so mobile and sessile components, distributed and likely shared within a trust group.

Mining, peer mining, is going to be part of that. I dream of myNodeBTC.com distribution on a FutureBit.io node, full blockchain and mining in a pool, of your choice, like Ocean