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Comment by mindcandy | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Cash is about trying to make transactions faster and cheaper by increasing the block size (and rate?). Upside: Might be able to use it directly to buy coffee with a reasonable UX. Downside: would likely lead to a small number of huge machines managing the world's blockchain. The Bitcoin Core group really wants people in poor nations to be able to run their own Bitcoin nodes on their cell phones eventually. They value decentralization above UX.

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No, they want Bitcoin to be a "store of value", whatever that means. Poor people being able to run a full node on a low-end phone is pointless when a transaction fee due to the artificial block size limit is more than a months wages.

>Poor people being able to run a full node on a low-end phone is pointless when a transaction fee due to the artificial block size limit is more than a months wages.

or just wait for a lull in the transaction volume and pay pennies per tx? eg https://blockstream.info/tx/3b9ce26a827b014e5f6cda461f5fa112... from last block only paid 14 cents.

I'm not sure why every user needs to run a full node. Satoshi himself said that SPV clients would be enough for most users:

"Simplified Payment Verification is for lightweight client-only users who only do transactions and don't generate and don't participate in the node network. They wouldn't need to download blocks, just the hash chain, which is currently about 2MB and very quick to verify (less than a second to verify the whole chain)."[0]

It's not clear what benefit the user or the currency gains from having 90% of users running full nodes instead of, say, 50% or 10% doing so. In any case, when people in poor nations have phones that can manage uninterrupted 24/7 connections to the bitcoin network, they'll probably also be able to afford 2 TB of storage (currently costing about $50) which would be enough to store 10 years of 4 MB blocks.

[0] https://blockchain.news/wiki/satoshi-quote-on-trust

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