On the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients

Keagan McClelland suggests that light clients should have the ability to choose their full node tethers explicitly. This would allow them to work off of a trusted source, which could be limited to authenticated peers. While it may not be realistic to expect everyone to run their own node, this trust model could help limit costs without exposing the risk of consensus capture by economically weighty institutions. However, the RPC interface in Bitcoin Core isn't ideal for this as it exposes unnecessary functionality and introduces risks. For instance, some commands can start intensive CPU and disk I/O tasks. Electrum servers utilize an alternative method where they read blocks from disk and use the RPC interface for header syncing. However, Electrum servers are also susceptible to DoS attacks through addresses with many transactions.