>Not doing those things actually weakens the network. It's true but it's not exactly in the same category. I was mainly considering attacks that would attempt

>Not doing those things actually weakens the network. It's true but it's not exactly in the same category. I was mainly considering attacks that would attempt to mess with the ledger, not a denial of service. DoSes are a problem of course, but it's transient and can be fixed "in hindsight" if it actually becomes an issue. Successfully tampering with the blockchain on the other hand would be a massive shitfest and non-trivial to fix. I'm not really worried about the number of nodes becoming insufficient to relay the transactions because clearly people who are invested in bitcoin have all kinds of incentives to keep it running. That means that big exchanges and "whales" could easily invest a few dollars a month to run a full node on a high bandwidth VPS. Keeping Bitcoin usable would actually be a good incentive to run full nodes if that ever became a problem. If Bitcoin really keeps growing eventually banks, big companies and governments will want to run nodes and I presume they won't host them on a raspberry pi connected to a 56k landline. On the other hand if your internet connection is too crappy to support 8MB blocks (14kB/s, remember?), I can't really imagine that it'll do a lot of good as a backbone for the bitcoin network. If anything you'll end up eating up bandwidth from external nodes as they forward you the blocks and transactions while not really contributing much yourself.