unlimitless

and then my wallet bans your peer and moves on. Not an issue

He didn't give the strategy as a requirement for light wallets to actually work. He gave it as an example of making the security trade off better. Light wallets do work. To fool them you have to have to be able to 51% the network and sybil my node. Not likely, especially if my spv wallet is checking multiple sources, even over https.

I feel you, you are correct btw.

You trust the hashpower in the aggregate, you do not trust the node that gives you the information. That is because the block solution is independently verifiable by the spv wallet. They can also independently verify that a transaction was indeed in a block. To say they don't verify anything or trust someone is not true. They don't validate the rules, they validate the hashpower. If the hashpower is evil, bitcoin is fucked anyways. If the hashpower is evil your full node can be fooled into accepting a payment for something and reversing it with their superior hashpower. The whitepaper assumes the majority of hashpower is honest for bitcoin to work...

Whitepaper, section 1, end of last paragraph...

"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."

If that sentence is broken, like you give as an example that would fool an spv wallet, then by definition bitcoin is not secure.

I'll just leave this here...

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

"At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node."

Satoshi was well aware of specialized hardware. If the majority of the planet were using bitcoin, it would not be necessary for every user to be a node. It would still be plenty "wide and deep" if businesses were running it. The security of SPV is actually quite good.

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/188/

"I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.

At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN."

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/287/

"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."