Ethereum is committing one of the economic ideas that typically backfires. In this case, the issue is that most people dont run an Ethereum node and its a threat to the decentralization of the network. So what they have manged to do is force anyone who stakes to run a ethereum node. What could go wrong? Maybe less people will stake. Maybe they will only stake via 3rd parties which also increases centralization.
And if we want to get really pessimestic, ISPs may be looking at how to reduce bandwidth on their network, to save money. And the ISPs may discover that Ethereum, and the homestakers specifically, are consuming an enormous amount of bandwidth. And then the ISPs will update their terms and prohibit any crypto/blockchain related node activity. I hope it doesn't come to that. But that honestly seems to be the outcome with the way Ethereum is acting. Their sharding solution, which is coming in a few years, which is just a fancy blocksize increase, will increase bandwidth consumption further.
And if we want to get really pessimestic, ISPs may be looking at how to reduce bandwidth on their network, to save money.
Why wouldn't they just charge more?
The real issue is how censorship resistant such high bandwidths will be. It will be trivial for hostile governments to locate and shut down Ethereum archival nodes if, as Vitalik wishes, the blockchain grows by 85Tb/year:
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I wonder if you could make money off of timed network attacks + shorting on leverage.
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Wouldn't there be an ISP that just sells a different pricing tier for internet? A "high-bandwidth" or "low-bandwidth" package? Don't we kindof already have that? Err, at least we did.
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