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This whole pipe dream of little Jimmy running his full Bitcoin node on a raspberry pi in order to protect against the big bad bankers/government/whatever was never based in reality. Bitcoin was always destined to end up centralized. Either in the form of powerful companies controlling it (development, Lightning Network, etc) or large concentrated groups of miners.

Whichever path it ends up going down, centralization is guaranteed.

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Well, there's a large middle ground between "little Jimmy's raspi's 4GB sdcard' and 'VISA's multi-PB datacenter'.

While there is certainly centralization pressure on mining, I do not agree that 8MB blocks make it impossible for everyone except for 'powerful companies' to run a full node, especially a pruned one. An enthusiastic early adoptor or investor holding, say, $100k of the token is more than capable of spending $500/yr to run a colo'd node. Would they prefer to spend $0 and host it at home? Probably. But the expense of a high-end VPS or low-end colo box is not totally prohibitive. We're not talking about more than a few rack units worth of HW.

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