Ethereum light clients will make it trivial to verify the state of the blockchain and interact with it without also having to store the entire blockchain.
The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now, but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost of moving away from these centralized services is pretty low.
I think this is “the point”. This is like saying you can switch away from GMail by running your own mail server. People don’t want to run their own mail server.
Will the ethereum light client run in metamask with no configuration? I’m afraid anything short of that is too heavy.
He's saying that configuring MetaMask to work with a light client is as easy as changing the RPC URL. The light client still needs to be installed/configured separately.
Ideally, as Moxie suggested, MetaMask itself integrates a light client into its wallet, so that it becomes the default configuration.
The idea of light clients is they will be bundled inside of apps/websites/extensions. So yes running a light client will be easy because it’s just happening in the background of the app, replacing the api hopping we do now with direct call/response to the chain.
So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.
The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now, but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost of moving away from these centralized services is pretty low.