>Notably, anyone can operate a full node. There is no specialized hardware required.

Great! The 51% cartel summons their crony Beff Jezos who runs a billion minimal & globally-distributed (compromised) BTC full nodes with his enormous compute resources. How does this affect the integrity of the network?

How does my new full node connect to the network? Are there hardcoded relay/coordinator IPs that it tries to connect to? Who controls those?

>How does this affect the integrity of the network?

it doesn't. operating a node isn't a vote.

>How does my new full node connect to the network

there are boostrap nodes that the client initially connects to, but afterwards it connects to nodes based on previously seen nodes and nodes it has heard from other nodes.

The prior comment implied that full nodes had some power in ensuring the integrity of the network even in the event of a 51% attack. You are suggesting the opposite. Which is true?

It's the economic majority - an exchange or a merchant has a lot of economic influence, some guy with a VPS almost zero.

Isn't this just proof-of-stake with more steps? And those steps aren't built into the protocol, so they require even more trust.

>Isn't this just proof-of-stake with more steps?

It's related, yes. The main difference is that rather than your power being determined by how much bitcoins you hold, your power is determined by how much influence/power/contribution you have in the overall bitcoin ecososytem. A major merchant might not hold that many coins compared to the average whale, but probably holds more influence.

>so they require even more trust.

I wouldn't say it requires more trust. It's not like bitcoin holds an election every few years for determining which party holds the economic majority.

> I wouldn't say it requires more trust. It's not like bitcoin holds an election every few years for determining which party holds the economic majority.

But it's at least possible, from the protocol, to determine the balance of each address, and for each address to vote (with a message on the blockchain) for or against a given proposal.

Compare that to trying to determine which address "probably holds more influence", which seems like something you'd have to trust someone else's (off-chain) judgement on.

Yes, but that doesn't work if what you're voting on is consensus-critical (e.g. the ordering of blocks). If you're talking about other rule changes, sure. In practice, I think most would consider Bitcoin's sluggishness of rule changes to be a feature, not a bug. Because the process is not entirely deterministic, it is much harder for a bad actor to corrupt.

> Because the process is not entirely deterministic, it is much harder for a bad actor to corrupt.

As in software, a lack of determinism means a lack of reproducibility, and without reproducibility it's harder to have consensus.

In particular, if bitcoin makes a rule change (or refuses to implement a rule change), such a decision lacks the transparency and accountability needed for good governance, because the bad actor can just say "Well, that's just how things worked out that time. Blame the RNG.".

I don't think this is a theoretical concern when it comes to a bad actor corrupting the bitcoin protocol development process.

Proof of stake has a very specific definition. In Bitcoin, it's possible for a client to bootstrap with only knowledge of protocol rules. This is not possible in a proof of stake cryptocurrency, which also requires a trusted third party.