The types of nodes that will be around next month

[Jet Cash]

It seems that there is  going to be quite a mix of nodes running next month. As I see it, these will include

Full mining nodes
SPV mining nodes
Thin nodes who don't perform any confirmations
SPV nodes
Full nodes with a closed input port
Full nodes with both input and output ports open
Nodes running Satoshi 0.12
Nodes running older versions of core
Nodes running alternative software such as XT and Classic
Pruned nodes
Light clients who just push transactions.

Only miners get a financial return for running nodes, and this return will decrease as we approach the halving and then the quartering. Core 0.12 offers quite a few advantages, and hopefully most people will upgrade to that. We may also gain a few new recruits who will run pruned nodes. We need several thousand of these full nodes to preserve the integrity and decentralisation of Bitcoin. How can we offer incentives to people to run these nodes? imho you get better control and security of your Bitcoins and transactions as a full node, but will these advantages be enough to keep people maintaining these nodes?

[Jet Cash]

I forgot to include the nodes that are supporting side chains. These nodes will handle the transactions that give value to the side chain currency. Do you think that these will be enough to counter the consolidation in mining that will follow the halving?

[watashi-kokoto]

And for what purpose you need the summary?

[tobacco123]

I guess for me, the full nodes (bitcoin core or classic) are the only ones that count...

[SISAR]

Only miners get a financial return for running nodes

That is not true. Anyone who has considerable amount of money invested in Bitcoin or ecosystem is running a full node. 100% of such people I know including myself are doing it because we are aware there is no "others that should do it for ourselves" with Bitcoin, here you are your own bank and should behave responsibly toward your own money else you risk losing it all. It costs so little to participate in trustless manner. It costs maybe a few dollars per month to have extremely secure local storage for my coins. It would be increadibly stupid to cut costs there.

Financial return is in the fact there is no way I can wake up tommorow and not own my coins anymore which is what can easily happen to anyone using unofficial offline or online wallets. Such people can lose money anytime while I can't hence if trouble strucks I would not lose money which equals becoming rich at the times everyone else are becoming poor.