This seems incorrect. Isn't a node a process on the network that is mining blocks? It does not seem as if a process that simply reads blocks but does not add any hashrate is participating in the network as I understand it.
I don't think there are any Satoshi quotes that definitely prove what he intended.
But there are some quotes of him talking about data centers and the like.
The miners vs nodes vs blocksize/scaling debate just wasn't a thing that anyone was thinking about back then.
[Nodes] vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
* Another phenomenon he didn't imagine was mining pools, which drastically changed the dynamics of mining.
But that's an interesting point re mining pools. Do you have any links to more information about how they drastically changed dynamics?
Or, perhaps, you don't actually know how bitcoin works, and therefore you can't explain how miner 'support' disappeared, as soon as it came time to decide whether they wanted to be bitcoin miners, or become alt-coin miners? You know, given that the nodes police and enforce consensus in bitcoin 'n all. Miners had a choice. Do what you're told, and mine according to node consensus rules, or don't get paid in bitcoin. So they did what they were told.
And here you are, with you still trying to fight a battle you've already lost. Four times. Losing exactly the same way every time. Because even after all of those losses, you still can't figure out why you always lose. Because even after all of those failures, you still don't understand why you lost, because you still don't understand how bitcoin works.
However I image if suddenl 100% of the miners decided 42MM bitcoins is better (because 42), something a lot of users would be opposed to (printing money), things would become 'interesting'.
A standard node will almost never produce a single new block.
For that, you need custom asic or luck.
Yes, see section 5 of the white paper referenced in OP. It is quite clear what "peer" means in the context of Bitcoin. Others are mistaken here.
No. It is only the validation that is important, because it is only the validation that ensures that consensus is maintained between nodes, and valid transactions can be included in the blockchain. Nodes even define the algorithm that miners must use in order to produce valid blocks.
There has been a hard education for people over the past year that have carried an incomplete understanding of how bitcoin works, and that has been encouraged by centralized companies that are attempting to wrest control of bitcoin away from its nodes. There have been four wildly unsuccessful hostile fork attempts (XT/Classic/BU/2x), and two in which alt-coins were forked (BCH/BGLD) from bitcoin in order to attempt to convince people to use their alt-coin instead of bitcoin. All of these attempts have been failures, because all of these attempts have not understood how bitcoin works, and the fact that nodes are the peers in bitcoin, and they police and enforce consensus.
So there are nodes, which are peers. And there are people who need nodes for performing bitcoin transactions, and some of those people are miners, and some of them are just making good-ol-fashioned transactions. The correct term is "I am a peer, and I use this node for my transactions, which create blocks". Or "I am a peer, and I use this node for my transactions, which are payments."
Download it for yourself and see.
I believe in 2008 Satoshi did not understand the full implications of ASICs or economies of scale. (S)he probably didn't even realize that ASICs existed.
Regardless of the whitepaper, in our modern cyberscape the only way to be certain that the original rules (21m coins, can only spend your own money, etc.) are followed is to be confident that a wide and deep pool of users are verifying them. That is strictly at odds with heavy on-chain scaling.
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/
"At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node."
Satoshi was well aware of specialized hardware. If the majority of the planet were using bitcoin, it would not be necessary for every user to be a node. It would still be plenty "wide and deep" if businesses were running it. The security of SPV is actually quite good.
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/188/
"I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN."
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/287/
"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."
This revisionism is a long running and well known war, here is the core political bloc in question actually attempting to justify editing the white paper to push their perspective over reality.
Cancerous stuff. https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/1904
Every participant in the system has a part to play and has a choice, miners choose which chain to mine and in doing so secure that chain from attack and earn a return, people that run nodes pick the nodes to run based on which chain they believe has the most value, or in the case of miners in order to mine the chain they believe has the most value, spv wallet users transact on the chain they value and pay fees to support the upkeep of it, the simple act of conducting trade with a cryptocurrency gives the entire apparatus basic value, so the people that don't give a damn about any given blockchain and just want to use it to move some completely unrelated asset from a to b also still give the system value, and of course the holders and traders of the actual blockchain assets give the system value and play a part in resolving contentious forks, by evaluating what they see as the market value of a given blockchain asset, forked or otherwise, and profiting or losing based on that insight.
Short of outright theft of a private key, nobody may compel even the smallest user of a blockchain to perform an action that they do not freely wish to undertake, not all the devs writing node software, shills pushing political agendas, or even miners mining blocks in the chain can change that fundamental aspect of the system that keeps it actually properly decentralised. The only way around this is to drive the vast majority of transactions off chain and force most end users to operate through third party intermediaries that manage their actual potential transactions in the system.
Like exactly what core are doing with the lightning network, for example.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7fsbw5/divorcing_the_s...
> There have been four wildly unsuccessful hostile fork attempts (XT/Classic/BU/2x)
These were all upgrade attempts that failed to gain miner support. Calling them "hostile forks" is stupid. The only thing hostile with them is the threat they pose to the developers who do not want to scale Bitcoin on-chain, for whatever reason.
> All of these attempts have been failures, because all of these attempts have not understood how bitcoin works, and the fact that nodes are the peers in bitcoin, and they police and enforce consensus.
No. Spinning up mass nodes in a sybil attack has no relevance.
They failed because they failed to gain enough hash power backing their upgrade plan. This is due to politics and economics.
That's a terrible misunderstanding. If nodes can reach consensus by simply agreeing on transaction validity, then what purpose do you believe miners serve?
The definition of a node is provided in Section 5 of the white paper mentioned in OP. The logic that explains "why you must mine in order to be a peer" is explained in Section 4.
Non-mining nodes are trivial to Sybil, they are "one-IP-one-vote" per Section 4. Only miners are "one-CPU-one-vote." That is why nonminers (what you call "nodes") are not peers to the system, but rather leeches / relays.
Or, perhaps, you don't actually know how bitcoin works, and therefore you can't explain how miner 'support' disappeared, as soon as it came time to decide whether they wanted to be bitcoin miners, or become alt-coin miners? You know, given that the nodes police and enforce consensus in bitcoin 'n all. Miners had a choice. Do what you're told, and mine according to node consensus rules, or don't get paid in bitcoin. So they did what they were told.
And here you are, with you still trying to fight a battle you've already lost. Four times. Losing exactly the same way every time. Because even after all of those losses, you still can't figure out why you always lose. Because even after all of those failures, you still don't understand why you lost, because you still don't understand how bitcoin works.