(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 2)
Some people argue that, by exposing the identity of every blockchain node in public and letting people monitor the decency of its size in terms of computational power as well as the authenticity of its transactional decisions, we can ensure an idealistic scenario in which a fair number of nodes with similar hash powers can coexist in a state of perpetual competition (thereby preventing one anonymous mining pool from taking over the entire network). This, however, raises a major question.
If each node in the blockchain is expected to be publicly identified and monitored, what's the point of using the PoW (Proof of Work) algorithm in the first place? The reason why Satoshi Nakamoto and other pioneers of Bitcoin came up with such an obnoxiously inefficient method of consensus was that it allowed fully anonymous participants of the blockchain to validate each other's transactions without having to worry about Sybil attacks (because, if nodes are anonymous, even a single person can create a bunch of anonymous nodes for the purpose of casting an unfairly huge number of votes during each decision-making process). If all nodes have clear identities (i.e. no duplicates that were made effortlessly), all we need to do is just let them cast votes on a "one-vote-per-node" basis and make them reach consensus whenever more than half of those votes agree on the validity of the most recent block.
And the reason why I am mentioning this is that some of the proponents of big-block cryptocurrencies such as BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) are claiming that a blockchain being maintained by a group of publicly exposed large-scale nodes (ones that are operated by institutions which are financially stable/authentic enough to handle enormous block sizes) will solve not only the problem of prohibitively high transaction fees, but also the problem of monopoly and corruption among the anonymous (and thus unregulated) swarm of nodes. What they are overlooking is that we don't really need a PoW-based blockchain to achieve this.