Is there no way of tracking thin clients as nodes, or do these not count as nodes to the network? I get that there would be no way of doing this for something like an exchange that "funnels" many people, but wouldn't a hypothetical thin client on a phone still count as a node?

After reading up a bit on the value of Bitcoin (and anything in an economic space really) as a measure of the supply and demand in the market I got to wondering whether it would be technically possible to have a Bitcoin-centered measure of demand by looking at the number of new clients in the network.

Is this a plausible method? Is this something that could be used to stabilize volatility via technical means? Am I a fool, because this is already factored into the mining difficulty based on the number of miners?

It would be a push to say I'm even an amateur economist, so I'd love to hear some thoughts.