> you argue that your position/paper does not rely on potential future innovations

Let me ask you something: how much of my paper did you actually read? Again, the first half discusses current bitcion (actually 2019 bitcoin, when I wrote the paper). The second half discusses a prediction of future bitcoin. And did you read the section on User Growth and Growth of Public Nodes? Its very relevant to your line of thinking. https://github.com/fresheneesz/bitcoinThroughputAnalysis#use...

> a secondary assumption: that off-chain transaction solutions... will .. undergo development and innovation that will make them widely useful

Nothing in the core of my paper relies on any assumptions about the lightning network. The paper is about on-chain throughput not 2nd layers. The only mention of the lightning network is in discussion around how much on-chain throughput the lightning network would need if it indeed scales up to a large fraction of the world's tranasctions.

> Here is another instance where you rest your starting assumption on further assumptions about new Bitcoin node software

I believe I made my assumptions very clear. The easiest attack against bitcoin today is a Sybil attack that drains the resources of public nodes. Because that is the weakest link of bitcoin, that should be the highest priority to improve. It is rather indisputable that making a full node take more resources will reduce the fraction of people willing to run a public full node, and that making a full node take less resources to run will conversely increase the fraction of people willing to run a public full node. Do you disagree with that last sentence?

The next important question would be how elastic is that relationship? Would reducing the resources by half double the number of public full nodes? Would it do more? Less? Another question would be: how many more public nodes would we get from further adoption of bitcoin? And again, the third piece would be: how much adoption would we get from increasing on-chain throughput? This 3 variable set of relationships would be quite interesting to add the the discussion of this in order to contrast the goals I chose vs the ones you have. Are you willing to do that math or make estimates? Or are you just demanding that I put in the effort to evaluate your claims (that increasing throughput via larger block size is the fastest way to improving bitcoin's worst-case / weakest-link security) for you?

Of course, your assumption seems to be that bitcoin is most suceptible to a political attack, whereas the easiest attack I've analyzed is a Sybil attack on public node resources. Are you willing to quantify the risks and costs of attack there and do the analysis? If so, I think that would be very valuable. But as it stands, it sounds like you're simply claiming that you have discredited my work without actually showing any of your own work that might give rigorous evidence that my paper has flaws that can be improved on.

I also asked you a question that you ignored. I'd appreciate an answer:

>> 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?