Controversial opinion: Prepare to lose your bitcoin. I believe that almost everybody will eventually lose their entire stack. Hodlers will get rekt. FIRE and early retirement, travel the world guys will get rekt. Some bug in a popular wallet, some seed generation algorithm will be reverse engineered like milk sad, or any other random way that will compromise your seed words and make you lose your sats. Prepare for that. Have alternative storing options, preferably on metal plate with no multisig nonsense or anything else. Just drop 1 million sats on a wallet that you've generated with randomness and leave them there. Have cashflow to recover. Ideally from online businesses. Have a network of bitcoiners that will be willing to help you get hired again, to trade with you, to support you. I think we'll only start seeing more and more of this as price goes up and incentives to trick people are increasing. The point is to put yourself in a position to get some of it back immediately, not to hoard sats.

Running a node is the only way to have a vote in the bitcoin system. For example, my node will never run drivechains, even if they manage to do get through. The right to vote in the bitcoin protocol is analogous to being a citizen in Ancient Athens. Not all were citizens, and (unfairly) all were male, contributing members of the Athenian society. There were slaves and people born elsewhere that didn't have citizen rights. And anyone going against the city-state was ostracized, but that's not possible in bitcoin. The analogy still stands, because the Athenian citizen had to stay informed on current events, matters of the state and had to vote on various issues. That's why democracy worked, not because everyone voted, but because the voters were mainly valuable citizens. Back to bitcoin, it seems we're creating the same sort of governance. Informed noderunners get a vote, people who leave the thinking to others do not get one. It's a sort of democracy of 17.000 noderunners and it's messy but it works so far. And it's the only way to sustain one.