Oddbean

New nodes still need to sync. Multi-TB per year will get quite unwieldy, especially as we run into physical limits to data transfer and processing speeds when we're decades into this. Besides, you need a way to keep track of UTXOs to verify txs. Imagine when we're into the multi-deca-billions of UTXOs to track and verify. No go.

No you don't need to track UTXO's because UTXO's are stupid. Them and blockchain are the constraint of the whole system. The distributed ledger is all that matters. You don't need to know "who sent what". You only need to know "who owns what". That's it. The ledger. The logic is simple: Has key? Has balance? Send approved.

Only ~18500 nodes accessible worldwide. I run 3 of those, and 2 of them are pruned. 99% of people will never run their own node, which to me largely invalidates the argument against larger block sizes. I would rather have larger blocks and smaller fees. If I truly want to be my own bank, I would have no problem adding hard drives to a server.

I don't think there is a storage problem, and once again, pruned nodes would be fine for most. I wonder how many people are actually running full nodes right now. The speed is dictated by your internet. I imagine most people are not hosting on their own infrastructure either, but rather somewhere in the cloud, which will be highly accessible in terms of speed.

Good point @bitbybit. Decentralization is the limiter of speed. But even Litecoin has 2.5 minute block time. Not any more or less usable than BTC. But it is faster. To me, usable has to be 4 sec or less. I'm testing and learning Nano now. It's always been of interest to me. Checks all the boxes, fixed supply (all mined up front), instant transactions. I don't understand its mining/consensus yet. Maybe a dud. We'll see. I think Bitcoin has a wakeup call. It can remain as "digital gold", slow, store of value. But that means people use something else for daily transactions. Lightning, or another L1. To me, the usability difference between Lightning vs another good L1 is minimal. Risks, exchange time, costs. In fact Lightning probably fares worse at these. So if a faster L1 protocol comes out with moderate security, capital will flow there for payments. But it may start accumulating there and avoiding going back to Bitcoin at all if/when that L1 protocol proves itself. Very likely scenario IMO.

You need a node to maximise privacy and for CPU mining. I'd say that incentives are better aligned for Monero node operators than for Bitcoin. Amd Monero is 99% price insensitive cypherpunks. While Bitcoin has 1% cypherpunks.

Not to mention that when a miner broadcasts a block they have an advantage over all other miners if they find a hash with a high enough difficulty. They broadcast that new block and are already working on the next block before the rest of the world knows. That's why you see alot of pools win multiple blocks in a row.

Exactly @Sovereign Bear At the crux, you're arguing more volume, lower fees. To achieve the same income as less volume, higher fees. Higher throughput. That benefits the network and users. Efficiency.