Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is more and more vulnerable the less nodes it has.
The less nodes it has the more likely a ddos becomes which could have fatal consequences.
This kind of attack where an only medium size enitity (like mastercard or visa for example) could ddos 90% or more of the nodes on the network is highly overlooked and underestimated. That's also a reason a blocksize increase which would further reduce nodes is very unwise.

Imagine Bitcoin with less than 1000 nodes ... it wouldn't be secure at all anymore.

If someone really would manage to ddos almost all nodes on the network i could imagine multiple forks to occure.

Correct me if i'm wrong.

Centralisation is a problem and it might get worse when block are consistently over 2M. We are not there yet. When there are more merchants accepting bitcoin and more bitcoin startups, we will have more high quality nodes. I think we have more nodes than reported because most users do not have their bitcoin core opened all day.

It's true that we are having less nodes, and that's why nodes are incentivated and there is also dedicated hardware for nodes... But what makes you think that bigger blocks means less nodes? The only thing that would make us have less nodes is simply people feeling like shutting down theirs. There isn't really a reason to have less nodes...

I guess one of the contributing reasons could also be that it isn't as easy as it should be. Imagine if there was software and you had to only press "turn on" to become a full node (once synced).
We should work on explaining the need for nodes. Setting up one isn't that cheap and with 1TB of storage you will be set for a while.

Not really. There isn't much more headroom with the current HDD technology, we're reaching the limit. At least the prices have returned to pre-flood levels.

hmmm... now that i think about it i should try to move my blockchain to another drive instead of my os ssd drive. thanks for reminding me of that. i just have to figure out how to do that now.

Bitcoin Core has many downsides. The main one is it's really RAM heavy/CPU heavy. HDD space like you point, is the least of the worries.
It takes ages to sync, often it stops downloading blocks and you need to reopen it, which means waiting again for the blocks to be validated. A lot of people have problems even when they make sure connections aren't being blocked by firewalls and whatnot.
Finally, since you need to create one new address to receive and send payments each time, it means you need to backup your wallet every time you make a new address... overall, it needs a lot of work, making it more accessible will make more people run full nodes instead of resorting to third party wallets.

Nodes aren't incentivized

Move your datadir from its default location to wherever you want and always start Bitcoin Core with the -datadir flag.

I really don't know why people post pictures of HDD space costs here. That's greatly misleading, because the most limiting factor is not HDD, it's network upload capacity. It's increasing at a much slower pace than HDD costs sink - and you can't even simply determine it by measuring network capacity at a single point in time, because most residential connections have explicit or implicit limits on total data volume (at some point the speed my suddenly drop, because the provider puts you in slow mode).


That's not true, Bitcoin core has a pool of addresses already stored in the wallet.dat. Only if you exceed the maximum number, you will need to make a new backup.

ya.ya.yo!

Why is it so difficult to download and install Bitcoin Core then just start the program and let it run? What is so hard about that. That is essentially what you are saying. It is quite easy to run a full node, albeit the wallet function of Bitcoin Core could use some UI work. There are also hardware nodes that you can just buy and works right out of the box.

I think anyone with significant amount of bitcoin holding (10K+ USD) will surely setup a dedicated node on high speed residential networks, the cost of such a server is very low comparing with the safety of his investment

Mining farms on the other hand will have a trend to further centralize, that is the danger, has nothing to do with block size

As others have said, the increased block size shouldn't be a concern for nodes.
And the block size is ofcourse dependant on the miners because I think that many of them would want to broadcast the found block as soon as it's found before someone else does.
That means that the size will depend on how fast a miner solves a block IMO.

Also, what does a DDoS attack have to do with centralization?

Why do you say that when many people clearly do not do so today?

Then why is startup and sync time the number one complaint about Bitcoin Core since 2013? Why have so many people and organizations told me they stopped running it because of that?

I thought you were talking about current drives? I find it hard to believe that anyone is running a node on a SSD.

For quite a good part of the population it is. You forgot port forwarding, which also most of the internet users don't know how to do. Besides, even though everyone seems very supportive (inc. this thread), I hardly think that most are running a node.
Simple. Uninstall Bitcoin Core; install into onto the desired drive (I've installed it to something like X:\Bitcoin), then just copy over the blockchain and wallet.

There isn't any centralization for a simple reason: Most people could run a full node, if they wanted to.
Centralization means: You can't join the club.
Just because some guy in the outback of china with a crappy internet connection can't run a full node, doesn't mean anything is centralized.
Are torrents centralized, because the same guy couldn't upload a HD-movie?

What would really happen, if the number of nodes decline too much? Some companies and enthusiasts, would just make new ones. Like I said, in the beginning, it is not hard to do so. I could just buy one of this full setup full nodes, go to a friend, who has ridicilous fast internet, he doesn't need and ask him nicely to just keep it connected to the internet and buy him some beer in return. No problem there at all.

they should be then, there was a proposal to give something, to who will run a full node, this should in part diminish the possibility of such scenario


what if some companies would start to provide services to help you setup a full node(because you have bad connection, because you are poor, because you can't trust running a full node on your machine ecc...), would this be considered centralized?

Well, it seems as though this might be a valid argument. The software used to determine the total amount of nodes, was fine tuned lately, and it has been determined that there are a lot less fully functioning nodes out there, than was initially thought.

Some people will also run nodes with Bitcoin XT and others with Core.

So there will definately be less nodes... This might become a problem in the future, if things continue at the trend is going now.  

If you run a node, make sure it is 100% configured for optimal performance.  :(

Maybe there are not so many people invested that much in bitcoin?  ::)

It takes time and also necessary skill. People will start to care about the network health only when they have been involved for enough long. I just setup my dedicated node last year, although I have been here since 2011. Mining is the first thing every one noticed because it is incentivized, running nodes are not. If mining always require a full node setup, then we might have millions of nodes  ;D  And only after you have a full node setup, you can start to run P2POOL, which is the ideal form of pooled mining, a catch 22 situation

Comparing with early days when everyone could run a full node, the number of nodes are shrinking. The hash power concentration also reduced number of miners. But the current nodes are mostly dedicated hard core nodes, they will exist as long as bitcoin exists, and hopefully the number will increase following more awareness of the network health

Why do you say that when many people clearly are today? At least their numbers are higher than the number of nodes. ,however you are correct. There is no incentive to run a node, thus only a few are doing it.
Although the individuals who are involved in Bitcoin on a daily basis will probably eventually run nodes. You're a fine example of this.
The network is nowhere near as decentralized as it should be (or used to be). I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't want our remaining 1k (in that scenario) nodes to be located in the US.

They have no control over anything. You can fork Bitcoin now and create Bitcoin XX and try getting others aboard.  :)

This is the problem I see with XT move, we should avoid politics in bitcoin, it should function like gold, no human can change the basic properties. Gavin threw out this XT version without reaching enough consensus, its intention is very unclear, bitcoin should not become a tool for people to realize their political interest

You obviously don't understand what XT is doing. There is no chance until a 90% consensus is reached. Inform yourself before you write BS.

Well and then people will pretend to update and switch back to core later. You'll be looking how many guns come out the woodwork after the fork to run core... prepare your anus.

Core won't die and two chains are inevitable. Gavincoin doesn't stand a chance longterm with or without "supermajority".  

Supermajority does mean nothing. The waters are poisoned by Gavin and his mob. Nothing will grow from it.

Why would anybody do that? Sure, there are always idiots, who do things like that, but that is luckily not a majority, they are just the "loudest" people on the internet and therefor think they are a majority.  So, yes, please kick yourself out of the system, by doing stupid things like that, I wouldn't mind a few idiots less in the Bitcoin-economy.

Exactly. Andresen and Hearn know very well that their XT-fork would fail to get enough support. The reason they mention it is solely to put pressure the other developers to integrate their changes in Core.

I'm happy to see that (among others) Maxwell, Todd, and Garzik have so far withstood this pressure. They have far better arguments and solutions to offer and imho they are in general more competent than Andresen and esp. Hearn to work on a financial software. Andresen and Hearn have both a corporatist, pro governance world view that is largely incompatible with and dangerous for the core aspects of Bitcoin.

ya.ya.yo!

As long as people are involved, there will be politics. But I don't think bitcoin should have anything to do with politics, any kind of political practice will just make things more complicated, the XT is obviously such a movement (Gavin using XT to test his support rate)

The consensus is easy to reach when the majority of transactions are queued for at least 1 blocks, and that will happen long before the 1MB cap were reached for every blocks

Here is a good article from tradeblock researching the capacity

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-4-simulating-practical-capacity

You are wrong. You may stand corrected.

The only nodes that matter for Bitcoin security are the miners, of which less than 50 nodes are actually mining (maybe 100 with possible Unknown agents). There will never be mining nodes that are not reachable or reaching, otherwise they would get orphaned and forked off.

The other nodes that matter are the exchanges (so you spend some of the BTC made from mining to pay bills).

The other nodes that matter are services (like merchants, explorers, APIs, trackers, etc).

Your shitty cloud VPS node does not matter. If it's on or off, Bitcoin is unaffected. The benefits are smaller and smaller for each supplemental relay node added to the network and there are no benefits to the node.

There are altcoins with 3-5 nodes online that still function after more than one year. There are some where only one node is online (exchange). And somehow Bittrex managed to fuck up and keep a coin with 0 network nodes online, the coin still had value before delisting.

Problem becomes the exploitation of bad nodes which will pop up when people try to exploit node incentivization - the idea was the security of the network was enough incentive. Not sure what the solution is for this

bitcoin is already centralized in a sense .. consider the number of people with control over the software, which is basically a form of centralization

Indeed, political power of programmers are on the rise in almost every industry. However there are many basic properties are prohibited to change, like total number of coins, POW mining, difficulty adjust mechanism, block generation speed, reward halving scheme etc... So core devs are mostly doing performance oriented improvements. Even so they would raise the debate of block size limit to political level, that is too much

If you agree that data depends on the area, then why do you keep repeating the same invalid arguments over and over again? Or do you think that US+EU = world?

Then you say you're "pretty sure", that Europe has better connection than the US. Are you just "pretty sure" or do you know it? In fact - in contrast of what your depiction suggests - Europe consists of more than one country and connection speed varies widely among European countries.

Here's some data (which is most likely nominal upload speed, not permanent high-volume (most providers will reduce speed if certain volume thresholds are reached)): http://www.netindex.com/upload/

ya.ya.yo!