I once had the idea to run a decentralized (technically federated) crud app. It's just a regular database with a central authority but users can access the database and its indices with IPFS. In theory nothing could take it down.

The practical problem is that users have to download the entire dataset. There are a lot of queries that cannot be done exclusively through an index and require downloading a substantial amount of data. Bitcoin (and any decentralized app) is exactly the same. It's just that they replaced the central server with a proof of work consensus mechanism that makes it truly decentralized.

It's not a practical user experience. Lightning is just a fancy federated paypal. The average user won't care once Paypal and Mastercard support Bitcoin. The inability to scale causes Bitcoin to give more power to established financial institutions. It's ironic. Bitcoin will just be relegated to a settlement layer.

You can still own your value as long as you have private keys. There's layers of abstractions built on top of it to make it comfortable for every day use and these may be owned by local institutions, but you retain the possibility to own your value no matter where you are located or where you move to without having to depend on some single entity.

> It's ironic. Bitcoin will just be relegated to a settlement layer.

Not ironic at all. Bitcoin is supposed to be a robust, decentralised, censorship resistant settlement layer. That's literally the point. It's the base protocol.

We don't, after all, expect users to care about TCP/IP whenever they post to TikTok.

But it's reasonable, based on current trends, to predict that the number of full nodes will continue to increase all over the world.