> I don't see anything at all in the places you mention explaining why your assumption is that Bitcoin needs 90% of the world being able to run a full node for the network to remain safe from an attack. Can you actually copy-paste..?

I don't have any good clips of text that would connect them better. A lot of the connection between them is left vauge and implied. I agree this can be improved. I've created an issue for this: https://github.com/fresheneesz/bitcoinThroughputAnalysis/iss... Feel free to comment there.

> I don't think I even have to provide a detailed analysis to make a high confidence claim that Bitcoin limited to 3 transactions per second cannot be used by the vast majority of the world population.

I certainly agree that 3 tps on chain is not enough for everyone to only transact on chain. However, there are many off chain ways people transact, some better than others. If your analysis were to make that a critical piece of the discussion, it would have to be justified in more depth. But I'm not trying to ask you to do hours of analysis here.

> Your paper suggests that Bitcoin can't scale to the point where less than 90% of the world population can run a full node using only 10% of hardware and network resources they already own, and remain safe from network attack

You may read what you want, but the intention of the paper was primarily to create a reusable way to evaluate the safe/secure throughput limits of bitcoin. The intention was explicitly not to come up with the "correct" or "best" assumptions or requirements of the network. It simply chose conservative limits and rolled with those. I was very clear about this in the paper. I'm happy to discuss the assumptions, but if your problem with the paper is that the assumptions aren't where you think they should be, you're asking of the paper something outside of its scope.

> You even argued that "it takes some research to configure" a Bitcoin full node, which supports my claim that under any plausible hardware requirements, it would be predominantly committed individuals who would go through the trouble of doing it.

I don't think you're understanding me. You are explaining the current state of things. I'm thinking about a future where bitcoin doesn't take research to configure, and is a no brainer to run. You don't have to worry about reaching bandwidth caps or slowing down your apartment's internet or making your machine slow when you're playing a game. We agree that it currently takes committed people to run bitcoin. I think that needs to change.

> Your analysis negates the existence of strategies for countering Sybil and Eclipse that would be far less costly to Bitcoin's utility

While I would love to hear about new strategies my paper doesn't incorporate, the first half of the paper explicitly doesn't incorporate new technology. It analyses the network as created by current bitcoin software.

> For example, there's trust-based network-peering

That's interesting. I worry that relying on trust might introduce issues, but its interesting nonetheless. I'll read through that. Thanks!

> Strawman. I never said that 10s of millions of people would be willing to do that

When I wrote that sentence, I still misunderstood what you meant. I forgot to revise after realizing you just meant that 10s of millions of people would need to be able to run full nodes, but it seems you think that far fewer would actually have to run full nodes.

> The attack does not need to be instantaneously neutralized for Bitcoin to survive it. It can incur significant short-term losses, and still not come close to erasing the social gains from allowing Bitcoin to be operational for billions of people for many years.

Perhaps you're right. But this paper neither refutes nor confirms that, and analysizing the optimal tradeoffs there is, again, out of scope for the paper.

> There are relatively low-cost ways to prevent that from being the case in the future.

Yes and many of those ways are even less secure. If you're referring to the trust-based network-peering you mentioned, perhaps there's something there, but trust-based is by definition not trustless, which is generally what bitcoin is built to be. I agree some kinds of small but less-than-minimal trust could definitely be useful. But the fact is that bitcoin doesn't currently have those mechanisms.

> It would require the majority of major stakeholders, including those running SPV data servers, to want it, and for that change not to face significant public opposition

It would be quite easy for an attacker to Sybil the network of SPV servers, so those wouldn't help in an attack. I think our disagreement here is that I'm talking about whether a damaging attack would be feasible, and you're talking about whether the attack would destroy bitcoin. Those are very different statements. Do you agree that a damaging attack could happen in the scenario you're describing?

> It's a broader and more sensible goal to pursue

Perhaps. But the scope of the paper is broad enough. I hope you can appreciate that ideas an techniques in the paper can be useful even if the goal is not something you agree with.