Bitcoin Forum

I know most people running FULL Nodes are not getting paid to do that. I think these people deserve some sort of compensation for their efforts. Why can normal Bitcoin users not voluntarily donate a small amount of money towards a weekly Lottery, where they themselves can win a prize, but the 1st prize goes towards a lucky FULL Node supporter of the network?

There would be obvious problems to overcome, but it would not be totally impossible to implement. Someone must validate the NODES to see if ports are open and that it is a fully functional node etc, before entering their Bitcoin address into the Lottery Pool. <This should be automated>

There are loads of people pumping thousands of dollars into this, without even getting a small thank you. The carrot for other people to also do this, will be the Lottery prizes.

I know a lot of people are against remuneration for this, but a Lottery will garner more support for this and people will be more willing to support the network. What do you think?  

I don't think giving any kind of incentive to bitcoin nodes is a wise idea. It may lead to creation of a large number of nodes by individuals with money to get that reward. That may even lead to sybil attack (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Sybil_attack)!

Someone who is running a Full Node shouldn't be looking incentive anyways. Being able to use bitcoin by fully verifying everything yourself without relying on a third party, should be enough incentive in my opinion.

On top of that if anyone is looking for reward, they should start running a LN Node because if I am not mistaken, you can earn some fees by processing transactions.

Why normal bitcoin users  can't use their money to run their own full nodes themselves instead?
Bitcoin don't need more full nodes, by the way. 20 pools can handle all the problems with propagation.

It depends on who is a "normal" Bitcoin user for you. It took me about 3 days to synchronize with the network, I guess that "normal" Bitcoin user wouldn't be so patient to wait 3 days "only for better security". Usually they depend on web or light wallets. There are about 11 thousand Bitcoin nodes right now and it looks like it won't change anytime soon due to Lightning Network which also gives you ability to create a node which in fact will earn (small amounts of) money.

I just use OP term. "Normal" look too broad term for me too. By downloading full blockchain users can't really improve security compared to light wallets and running full node has no impact on mining pools or blockchain state at all. 20 bitcoin mining pools in full control of all transactions and other full nodes either accept their blockchain or not. All blocks still will be downloaded from 20 top pools, it doesn't matter how many non mining full nodes propagate blocks.

Bitnodes.io aka. bitnodes.earn.com used to have this sort of program where it awards nodes which meets the criterion randomly, once per week IIRC. The whole program doesn't really compensate much for the overheads of running a node and it certainly does not act as huge as an incentive to run a node. The uptime for the node should be about 24/7 to have a chance, together with the others which focuses on the quality of the node.

The problem with this kind of program is that it isn't sustainable. Nodes are important but there are probably enough people running it such that a reward program isn't justified.

Out of curiosity, how were they doing it? Nodes (except for Electrum nodes) don't advertise their bitcoin address, so how did they know who & where to pay?

@Kakmakr

You spotted the incentive [ DO NOT POST SESC LINKS ]yourself in the "Lightning in 2020" thread[/url]

Although I disagree with the original observation (not your own) that Lightning-routing full nodes can profit, I think it'll only ever be a way to subsidise the costs of running a publicly accessible full node.

I don’t think a lottery is a good idea but I believe that incentives to full node operators is a good idea. This is because full nodes are important members of the network.

I understand that there are currently enough full nodes on the networks. But the amount of full nodes cannot be guaranteed by goodwill alone. In order to guarantee that there is always a sufficient amount of full nodes an incentive is necessary.

The issue at hand is than, which full node shall incentives be given to.

The common issue with this scenario is that, it is easy for someone to game the system by running multiple copies of a full node. To combat this issue, we should give incentives to full nodes that are backed by x amount of bitcoin. The amount of incentivized full nodes will thus be limited by the total amount of bitcoin in circulation.

Nope, the thing that made me think about this, was a Reddit topic under /r/Bitcoin where Node operators were discussing Nodes and what bandwidth they were using and one guy said that running a Node is a thankless/unappreciative job. It stuck with me, while a was typing a response to something that was said about Freebitco.in Lottery and then the light came on.  8)

Why not introduce a Weekly Lottery, similar to the one hosted by Freebitco.in, where you have 10 different prizes and the highest price going to one lucky Full Node operator and the rest of the prizes, going to the participants. <This way, both parties are incentivized to participate>

I think it can work, but I lack the knowledge to do it, hence the suggestion here. ^smile^

The node owner will have to create a webpage with their address included on it. The owner (or anyone else) will have to make a request via CURL to their server for their bot to crawl the page. It's pretty common for nodes to have webpage with statistics on it. I've had a node running with the program and I just created a page with my address without any fancy stuff.
Who is funding it? Why should we trust whoever is managing that incentive to not manipulate the system and have their own nodes win the lottery? Why would I want to run a full node because I can have a 1/10000 chance of winning that small prize?