The nodes are the mass of the system. The bits have joules, thus mass; literally. A large fork of nodes is a large fork of the chains mass, 2 histories of physical bits.
The term economic nodes is lo...
Exchanges might not exist in a hyperbitcoinized world, but there will still be "economic nodes". To scale bitcoin to a couple billion users, we'll need a banking system (best if a free banking system) built on top of it.