Some of this echoes Matt Levine's take on crypto and DeFi generally: you will repeatedly see the re-learning the lessons of hundreds/thousands of years of traditional finance.
I'm not sure that the "mobile device can't act as a node" is fundamental (it's more a quirk of the current systems), but "nobody wants to run their own server" => "centralization" is a great reminder:
> I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time.
I'm not sure that the "mobile device can't act as a node" is fundamental (it's more a quirk of the current systems), but "nobody wants to run their own server" => "centralization" is a great reminder:
> I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time.