What are the communities thoughts on Light Clients?

Curious what everyone here thinks about light clients and what the long term viability of them is. I get a bit disheartened because much of the conversation around blockchain focuses on its applications in developed economies and seems to be addressing problems related to finance in environments where energy, compute power, and political stability are relatively consistent.

For Ethereum to become the ubiquitous global settlement or interaction layer, we need to consider broader challenges like scalability, resource constraints, and scarcity everywhere. Light clients are basically the main thing Vitalik talks about at the moment and the EF seems to be funding a fair few of those projects.

For a light client to be useful, it has to provide at least some capabilities that are available with a full client. This includes the ability to submit transactions, provide read access to on-chain data, and verify if it belongs to the canonical chain.

At present, Ethereum light clients do not provide all these capabilities in a standalone, peer-to-peer application that can run on any device. These capabilities are still in development, and teams working in this area have been focusing on being able to verify data from an untrusted endpoint given by a node provider. A few projects have light clients running already such as Helios, and Lodestar, and Nimbus. Pier Two has a beta version light client in C# you can run as well.

With free, censorship-resistant, and lightweight access to Ethereum, light clients seem to unlock a range of practical applications that extend Ethereum's utility to real-world scenarios:

• A mobile-compatible light client with trustless access to smart contract state can enable devices like smart locks to be controlled using digital signatures from private keys.
• Ethereum smart contracts allow features like key rotation or multisig recovery, ensuring access can be restored if a private key is lost, without relying on centralised systems.
• In a world dominated by AI-generated content, light clients can help verify the authenticity of human-generated material by leveraging Ethereum's immutability and trustless nature.

Other potential use cases include supporting real-world use cases like smart locks and devices, leveraging Ethereum’s security, and verifying the authenticity of goods for supply chain tracking.