Bitcoin Forum

I just discovered this website:
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes

There are only 9624 full nodes operating right now.
I had no idea that the number was so low.

How many people know about bitcoin? There are millions of coinbase/bitstamp/bitfinex/binance/etc accounts!!

How come only less than 10 thousand people in the whole world decided to run a full node?
Near 25% of the network is in the US, with 2322 full nodes operating

Few months ago I decided to run a full node...  It was like an experiment.

Unfortunately, I had to give up, because my old 2010 notebook could not handle 200Gb of space.
I would have to delete some personal stuff, and as it was just and experiment, it was easier to just give up the idea.

Then, I looked at this website, how many people are running a full node in Brazil:
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/?q=Brazil
Only 34...

Running full nodes is important so that more people are contributing to the decentralization of the network, validating transactions.

Don't you guys think this number is too low? I know that probably the number is increasing over the years, but I was quite impressed with that number.
People talk a lot about total hash power, but isn't that number very important as well?

There are many more full nodes running, that page only lists ones that accept inbound connections.

Estimates put the number at about 84,000 although a significant number of nodes are spy node run only for the purpose of tracing transactions though we don't know how many.  In the past there was a higher rate of node running relative to the user base but the resources required to run a node increased substantially along with many other factors.

Listening node count was higher in the past; but UPNP being disabled by default due to repeated security problems with it, increased listening specific resource usage, and other factors have decreased the count even in absolute terms.

Most people after a couple of minutes of googling will be utterly turned off by the idea of running a full node, especially as there are ever more options that don't require you to ever go near the raw blockchain. Not many have that much hdd space to play with or spare bandwidth.

Throw in the lack of financial incentive and it's a slam dunk. Obviously there's a security incentive but it's human nature to let someone else do the heavy lifting until it bites you in the arse.

That current figure is pretty healthy compared to the past.

https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/?days=730

The number has definitively increased a lot, because in mid-2017 we had about 6000-7000 (from those that were visible on the earn.com website). I was actively following the big "Segwit debate" then, that's why I remember that number relatively well.

However, I don't think the current number is a problem. Full nodes are definitively important. But it's not important to have millions or even hundreds of thousands. Remember that validation work is mainly done by miners, and in simple terms non-mining full nodes become important mainly if there is something wrong with their work - apart from their importance for (bigger) users themselves, as they are more secure against some kinds of attacks.

From what I think to know as a non-programmer having read many forum threads and some other articles about that topic, it's important that there are enough nodes with some economic "weight" to work as a backup of the blockchain if a mining cartel attacks the chain. For example, if miners wanted to steal coins from Segwit addresses using a custom upgrade going back to old rules, full nodes could refuse to accept these transactions, and if there are no exchanges between the attackers, then the miners wouldn't have anyone to sell their stolen coins to (and the mined coins on their forked chain, so their loss would be even bigger).

From this point of view, it's mostly important that exchanges and (bigger) merchants run full nodes, to avoid being scammed with these worthless "non-consensus-obeying" coins.

It also helps if nodes are relatively well distributed, but it's probably enough that we have three big "centres" (oversimplified, the US, the EU and Eastern Asia) and some other small regional "hubs" so no government action or anther regional catastrophic event could shut the network down, and "regional sybil/hashrate attacks" cannot lure some nodes into accepting 1-conf transactions which will later be double spent.

Only after falling a lot.  E.g. on Jan 3rd 2012 there were over 16500 listening nodes tracked by sipa's seeder.

I believe the key to increasing and diversifying the number of Full Nodes is exactly the adoption. But not just curious users. We need more companies using Bitcoin and to increase confidence in the project it would be natural for them to opt for a full node as well.

Probably due to to the increase of blockchain size since 2012...

That was a period in time before mining centralisation and ASICs so there would've been thousands of people with small mining rigs. That's why ETH has more nodes of that nature than BTC these days.

These days Bitcoin nodes will either be industrial mining operations, exchanges or other services that need a full node or enthusiasts.

You could give it a go on an external USB Hard Drive. I've got a full node on one with no issues. I guess that you've probably got USB 2.0, which is pretty slow compared to what i'm using (usb 3.x is over 10 times faster), but still it may be worth a try for experimental purposes.

Only those who've small bitcoin technical knowledge and care about decentralization or privacy/anonymity when using SPV wallet who would run full nodes.
Even though you could use low-end/barebone devices to run Bitcoin full nodes since Bitcoiner/Bitcoin developer care about anyone can run full nodes with low cost, majority don't want to do it because they think they don't earn anything and only wasting their money by doing it.

The only way to increase the number are by encourage merchants with high volume to run full nodes and make people realize/remember why decentralization (specifically run full nodes in this case) matters.


HDD is cheap today and you can run both OS and full nodes with a HDD, so i suggest you to try run full nodes if you want buy another HDD.

At Brazil nothing is cheap lol
Also it is not worth investing im this old notebook anymore



This is an interesting solution. Maybe I will try later, I have one old external hd.

That is something I believed in, say, 2011 -- even the whitepaper says that merchants should run a node even with lite clients available...

But the norm for companies these days, especially small companies and startups, is aggressive outsourcing of all technical infrastructure even in their core domain.  So for example, there have been many bitcoin exchanges that don't run their own nodes, but outsource their transaction handling to third parties, and those third parties don't even operate their own equipment, but rent VPS service by the hour from companies like amazon.  As a result, it turns out that companies, even specialist "bitcoin companies" can't be counted on to operate nodes even where a simple risk analysis would say it was in their best interest to do so.  

Sorry, that is simply untrue. By mid 2011 almost everyone mining was using pools and not running nodes to mine.

Ethereum has _vastly_ fewer "nodes" than Bitcoin. You've been fed misinformation that comes from comparing the total number of ethereum nodes (listening or not) to just the listening bitcoin nodes.  Right now the numbers are 15,277 total ethereum vs 83,096 bitcoin nodes.  Moreover, the common ethereum configuration has security properties a lot more like Bitcoin SPV: they don't validate the history when they join they just blindly trust the hash power for it.

They call them "light-nodes". The difference should be known to newbies. Ethereum light-nodes are "nodes" that sync only the block headers, but they are "sharing" those headers with other "light-nodes", but still only tethered to the "core" network of full nodes.

Maybe some people who are running light-nodes believe that their "node" is propagating information in the Ethereum network?

Where can I find more information about the total number of listening nodes?

I think the best source for this is Luke Dashjr website. The number in there is 80659 Bitcoin Core nodes

https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html

And on coin.dance (https://coin.dance/nodes) you could check more charts.

https://i.imgur.com/Z5NtyQR.jpg

That is still a big fall. What happened? I believe I read from a blog somewhere that was written on May 2018, only four months ago, that said Bitcoin had 115,000 full nodes in the network.

Most of those numbers you have seen from the blog you are referring to might have just tried to run a full node temporarily and lost interest. People probably lost interest in running a full node because of plummetting bitcoin price. Also, most people just simply cannot afford to run full bitcoin nodes because of the bandwidth limit on some countries(like in the Philippines for example).

It's not wrong to say that there could be more than 100k full nodes in the network. Full nodes validate all of the blocks in the blockchain but they can either be a "listening" node, or not. Bitnodes measure the number by attempting to find IPs with the port open and send a message to validate their client version. They can't do this to listening nodes unless the listening nodes willingly connect to them. Its totally possible that there could be many many more nodes which doesn't have port 8333 open.

That's the answer. Most people just don't want to go through the setup required, and those that do don't always have the spare resources to allocate 24/7 to running a node.

Why can we not have services where people make donations to a global company with enough resources to host these full nodes for them. <Not virtual servers in the cloud>, like we have with Cloud mining.

I know there are big Bitcoin supporters out there, that might be living in areas where there is weak internet infrastructure or they might lack the technical knowledge to run these full nodes, but they will gladly donate some money to further the cause.

Is there currently services like this?

I believe that would beat the purpose of running a node. If you do not control the hardware, then that is someone else's computer.

Plus yes, there's a service for Ethereum users that runs nodes for you in a data center called Infuria. Haha.

This would lead to the centralization of the nodes from which Bitcoin Cash currently suffers. I would rather pay for multiple VPS rather than rent a dedicated server which would not be used at all and owned by me. Setting up Bitcoin Core is quite easy, especially if you decide to use GUI and know how to forward ports.


The Ethereum Blockchain is much bigger than Bitcoin's. Archive nodes have to store more than 1 TB of data! That's why many people choose pruned nodes which have to download only about 80 GB of data.

Is there someone trustworthy enough for such donations? No. Because that would lead us to become their slaves for the network to be run by them at their own convenience, and if they ever decide to swipe off the nodes during any time for any reason (like government interference) or for their own profit-thinking (where they might ask a ransom to host these nodes, stupid but true yeah), the whole community will suffer a lot because of their own decision to go for such service. Rather, we might go and setup our own nodes and drop them running over a VPS for a year or two.

Now, I need a brief explanation from someone super-experienced about nodes:
What are nodes exactly and how do they work?
Difference between nodes and masternodes.
How to setup a node using free VPS (like Amazon's EC2 instances) or even paid one?

This completely misses the point.  If one doesn't care about decentralization the whole of the bitcoin system can run on a _single_ node there isn't need for multiple nodes (much less many) but for decentralization purposes.

Paying someone to run nodes (or running one yourself on a third party controlled VPS service like amazon or digital ocean, for that matter) wouldn't serve much of a purpose.

Winner_takes_all approach of legacy bitcoin PoW algorithm has a binary nature (you win/you don't win) so luck is distributed according to Bernoulli function and this means high variance for small probabilities and it is why people should join pools.

Once a miner joins a pool he doesn't need to run a full node anymore, it is why instead of having more full nodes the number is declining despite the growing number of people who join the mining industry: Technically the number of real miners is declining and the number of mining slaves is growing.

The definite solution for increasing the number of bitcoin full nodes is decentralization of mining by getting rid of pools, it needs radical improvements to PoW and getting rid of winner_takes_all. Many readers are already aware of my PoCW proposal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4438334.0) committed to this purpose.

As of non mining nodes, an interesting alternative approach I'm working on is the possibility of removing the strict boundary between spv wallets and full nodes, letting people to run nodes with a relative security adjustable by the amount of resources they can afford. I understand this is not the right place to discuss it but the point is clear:

The cardinality of (both mining and non mining) full nodes of bitcoin is a direct consequence of the protocol and if one supposedly is concerned about this index being too low and insufficient for security purposes, s/he would be rather concerned about the protocol and whether it could be enhanced to improve the situation or not.

This makes no sense because full nodes doesn't mine.
Full nodes only validate transaction and blocks and hold a full copy of the blockchain.

Mining nodes may not even have a full copy of the blockchain.

You are unbelievably wrong: :o
Mining nodes are the most important full nodes because not only they validate the blockchain they actively participate in building and maintaining it. A miner without a full node is not a real miner as I said s/he is just a slave who has no clue about what is going on in the network.

Actually mining full nodes are critical components of bitcoin security. Unfortunately there is no concrete statistics to show how many people are participating in mining right now but the number of mining full nodes is definitively very low, it is because of pools and the alienation of miners from the actual process by them.

A non-mining full node is just a liability because of its costs and very small benefits only a few of bitcoin whales have a practical incentive to run such a node, average holders are more likely to choose running a spv wallet.

I don't disagree with your point on people running SPV wallets for their convenience but I do fail to see how non-mining full nodes can be a liability. It's not too expensive to be running a full node; old harddisk, spare computer/even raspberry pi would be enough. If you care about Bitcoin, running a full node should be something on your mind. It gives you security advantages over SPV clients and helps the network by validating blocks and transactions.

SPV client relies on full nodes, mining or not. An abundance of full nodes does, at the very least, help to alleviate the risk of a sybil attack on SPV clients and that is beneficial for all.

It is not just about hardware costs. You should also take into consideration the hidden costs of administration and maintenance as well. It would be pointless to have a full node that is not guaranteed to be available 24*7 with 99.9% uptime.

I personally run a full node for R&D purposes, some people may do it for altruistic purposes but very few people have a real incentive for maintaining a full node. Unfortunately and ironically running a full node for mining related purposes is in the bottom of the list because of the pools.

I got what you said now.

You are saying that we would have more full nodes, if all miners had an incentive to have a full node.

I do not agree with that, as miners should not waste their computer resources running a full node. Forcing nodes to invest in hardware and internet connection to run a full node will make mining even more expensive (and harder for new people to join) than it is now. It may cause a bigger problem. Even higher mining centralization.

From what I understand, managed pool will have just one (or a few) full nodes, then miners would just come with their processing power.

I found this by Andreas Antonoupolos on the subject

Personally, running a full node is pretty hassle free. I do update it occasionally and leave it to run by itself for majority of the time. I've never had any downtime and the set up was fairly quick. For Windows, Bitcoin Core is literally just a simple program install and Unix systems do have a script to use.

It's not exactly pointless to run your node for only a few hours at a time. When you run a full node that allows inbound connections, you are still allowing others to use your node to synchronize or as a node for their SPV client. It could potentially still help to strengthen the network and help others to sync. Doesn't seem like it has downsides to it. When you turn it off, nodes will simply find another peer to connect to.

To be fair, while its definitely very beneficial for the network to have more hashpower to secure it, the centralisation of the mining power isn't all that great. Not all of the pools listen to their users and they are free to choose whichever transaction to mine, amongst other things. The mining industry is extremely stagnated right now and it seems impossible for anyone new to join.

Seriously dude. It is no joke. A miner without a full node is a malicious entity. It is not part of the Plain Old Satoshi Bitcoin. It is made from greed and ignorance.


Antonopoulos is joking. He says a lot of bullshit, fuck pools.

My stance is somewhere in the middle.  It's not realistic to expect all miners to run a full node, but it's not safe if none of them do.  There have been past problems with miners not bothering to validate transactions correctly.  In 2015, careless SPV-mining led to a brief fork (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1108304.0).  If a majority of the hashrate skips validation, it sometimes doesn't end well.  It's better if there are "enough" miners running full nodes, but it's anyone's best guess (or perhaps a skilled mathematician's calculations) to determine what number constitutes "enough".  

Bandwidth is the biggest issue for me. I know my ISP uses bandwidth throttling once I have reached my quota of data downloaded in one month. But it is not too bad.

I will keep running it for as long as my pocket can support it.

I beg to differ. You will still have those people with enough resources and bandwidth to keep it decentralized. I want to add to that group, by giving people with local bandwidth and resource issues a platform to contribute to this important service.

These people would not necessarily be running a full node, because of these problems, but they can now contribute financially to run a full node, by just funding the people who can do this.

I have some friends in some rural areas with very bad internet and they desperately want to contribute, but the local infrastructure issues, stop them from doing that.

This does not mean that we would have only 1 organization doing this in 1 location. <It might be Bitcoin merchants in several different locations, with better bandwidth> 

I don't understand why? Amazon or any digital third party doesn't do it on their consent, nor do they do it for their convenience but it's us who do it (or can do it) and we can use VPN services to stop being watched by them that we are doing this, that too anonymously, and as well, is there anything illegal in doing like this?

There's nothing illegal about it. There is just no real benefit to the network if many or all nodes are running on VPS services like AWS. All of those nodes are using the same block of IP addresses. They are likely hosted in the same data centers, so they are centralized in both the same digital region (IP address blocks) and the same physical region (datacenter location). Furthermore, if Amazon or DIgitalOcean decided that they didn't want people running Bitcoin nodes on their VPSes, they could shut down those VPSes and take off a large portion of the network. Thus having many nodes on VPSes with the same VPS providers does not really contribute to the decentralization of the network and is similar to just one node being run.

Your position assumes there is a contribution created by running more nodes on Amazon. There isn't, for the most part.  Effectively, paying amazon to run more nodes is just funding a benign sybil attack by Amazon on the network.

I'm well aware that there are parts of the world where it is prohibitively expensive to run a node-- thats part of the reason why efforts like the satellite broadcast of Bitcoin exist.  But just because there is a problem doesn't mean that any particular alternative is a solution.

Just because someone takes on a cost does not mean they are making a useful contribution.  The first node on amazon was a useful contribution, perhaps you could argue that one in each availability zone is a contribution, but we're vastly beyond that, and adding more nodes on amazon mostly just improves the ability to monitor traffic without being noticed for amazon and sybil attackers who purchase their services.

No, my idea is actually not focussed on large companies like Amazon, because they are centralized and if they decide to shutdown all nodes, then we will lose a huge amount of nodes. I was thinking more of some individuals or smaller merchants with enough resources to help with this.

Let's say a small merchant in an developed country wants to host a full node and they have the resources, but they want someone else to pay for it, then this would be an ideal match. You create a website that brings the two parties together <anonymously> and you find someone to validate the merchant in some way. <If they do not host the node, you pull the funding>

I am just brainstorming some way to bring two parties together, that might help to increase decentralization of nodes. I never even considered that it must be one centralized organization. You bring them together and you provide a Bitcoin address, where people can donate money for the full nodes and then you monitor the partnership.  :-\

Well Ive been reading this thread over and I don't quite understand what is the purpose of running a node? I know with POS you get coins so there is incentive there but what would be the point of running a btc node besides to further the decentralization idealogy?

Plus running a node in "the cloud" is running it in someone else's computer, not the hardware that you control and manage. Technically you are not verifying and relaying anything in the network.

Don't worry, not your fault .   ;)

Basically, with bitcoin mining dominated by pools there are very few incentives left for running a bitcoin full node.

I suppose we are short in courage to face it, too.

There are no incentives, except that running your own node makes you not trust anyone in the network to make or validate your transactions for you. But who said decentralization would have no costs?

The original design of bitcoin is not based on such a weak incentive, keeping track of one's own wallet. It is solvable for mid-sized transactions and wallets by connecting to a handful of reputable nodes, running a spv wallet.

The main focus should be mining full nodes which have been slaughtered out by pools and coffin nailed by ASICs while we were debating block size and SW to have LN running.

Right... so now everything else is to blame except for the actual cause?  SegWit and Lighting have no relevance to this matter whatsoever.  The economic incentive was there, so some people took advantage.  That's all there is to it.  It also bit them in the ass in 2015 when they got it wrong and cost themselves money by building on the wrong chain.  So perhaps they learned something and will be less likely to make the same mistake again.  The network is resilient enough for it not to be a major issue.  Whatever we were debating in the community at the time, it wouldn't have changed a thing.  The miners tried taking a shortcut and paid the price for their lapse in judgement.  They should now understand the importance of validating.  Just because you perceive pools and ASICs to be the most prevalent issues in Bitcoin, it doesn't mean you get to convince yourself that everyone else thinks that too.  For a seemingly smart person, you do say some dumb things.  Stick to the math, you seem to be good at that.  Reasoning, not so much.  

It is totally nonsense. How is it possible not to blame distraction and distractors? Heh?

A new promising technology naturally faces challenges and obstacles, whose responsibility is to keep it safe and secure other than its community and the devs? And how they should be judged when they have failed to focus on the main issues?

What do you mean by I "perceive"? It is no joke! We are talking about decentralization for the Christ sake!

How do you "perceive" issues in bitcoin? How anything could be ever "perceived" more important than centralization threats?

Pools were swallowing hashrate and slavering miners on one side and ASICs were eliminating commodity hardware and ordinary people from mining scene and you and your genius devs were "perceiving" some more important issues worth focusing and spending your resources on?  

Apparently the word 'distraction' is somehow missing from your dictionary, to help you grabing it:

I'm blaming bitcoin community and its devs for being in a mental state in which they have lost focus and misjudgingly devoted their resources to issues not of vital importance at the same time that we have been and still we are face to face with critical centralization challenges. It is called distraction in plain English, add it to your dictionary.
 
 

The thing that keeps it in check is the alignment of incentives.  You know, that thing you arrogantly think you can screw around with and there won't be any consequences?  That.



Blame whoever you want, I still think you're an arrogant tool.  Devs aren't here to bow to your every whim.  They have the freedom to work on whatever appeals to them.  Again, you clearly care about pools and ASICs more than anyone else does.  If it's so important to you, go start your own coin where those elements don't factor into it.

I consider your technical arguments wrong and confused.

I think we're not capable enough to "teach" the devs that how their work should be done.


Hey, let's forget about "blaming anybody" or the ^distraction^ issue, I've got a plan for you here - when you know that you can get the complete source code of Bitcoin at GitHub, why don't you come up with a whole new concept where everything will be based on your "plan" and nobody would be there to blame for?

It is ridiculous:
When it is about ownership lot of people speak loudly and treat bitcoin like their property and when they are blamed for their mistakes, shills come here screaming about bitcoin being open source and nobody being responsible.

Just stop bullshitting and let the people who feel responsible about the last few years of bitcoin development path beware of their mistakes and try to do their job better. Nothing is over, with good faith and enough commitment bitcoin has infinite possibilities for overcoming centralization threats.

Shills are not helpful, we need responsible leaders and developers focused on keeping the coin decentralized.

Aliashraf,

We all understand that you are angry that other people don't want to spend their time radically redesigning Bitcoin in accordance with the "fixes" you demand which others have responded to and concluded your technical arguments are wrong and confused. We all also understand that you disagree with these analysis.

In this thread posts about these complaints are offtopic, they have little to do with the subject of the thread beyond some broad conjecture that you make that if there were less cause for pooling there would be a lot more nodes, a weak argument but one that could be made without all the vitriol. You're turning the thread into a series of abuses that will discourage productive on-topic discussion. Cut it out.

Greg Maxwell,

I'm not angry about anything and nobody has considered my technical arguments wrong or confused, you can just check.

This topic is about the total number of full nodes being lower than expectation and I'm suggesting that the only real incentive behind running a full node (besides keeping track of large balances/transactions) is mining related and the situation with pools has removed this incentive. How in the hell it would be considered off-topic?

I implicitly criticized the whole community for being distracted by block size and SW debate and preparation for LN instead of taking care of pools and ASICs and their centralization consequences. It was not my fault that some shills overreacted to my criticism and turned the topic to a "whose fault was this?"  debate with ridiculous arguments like nobody is responsible for anything!

Now, please instead of accusing me of going off topic, make it clear for us: Do you agree that we need far more decentralization in mining to have more full nodes and better security?

The point of running a full node is nullified if you aren't the one running it. Unless the machine running the node is under your control, you have to trust a third party. Running a full node is all about getting rid of trust.

What about pruning the blockchain?
It's already 200gb now, in a few years it's going to be 500, even 1Tb.

I would like to know your thoughts about it.

Is it so bad to use a pruned blockchain?

Pruned node is still a full node but there is still a slight problem.


Ethereum currently suffers from the too big blockchain size. Archive nodes store more than 1 TB of data which is way too much for an ordinary user. No wonder why so many users use pruned nodes.

But specialization always develops in any "industry". We cannot always make citations on the white paper because Bitcoin has already developed further beyond "Satoshi's vision".


Matt Corallo is developing Better Hash. It will make miners run their own nodes, and bring some node decentralization back among miners, https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/bips/blob/betterhash/bip-XXXX.mediawiki

on this point you can, in particular the white paper pointed out that nodes should be run for independent security (last sentence of section 8) and that mining would be done by specialized hardware...  moreover, there have been a number of altcoins to make radical design changes along the lines of what aliashraf has been promoting and yet they do not see an increase in nodes.

Mining centralization is certainly a problem, but that doesn't make it the origin of every problem nor does it mean that any particular proposed solution would improve it or anything else for that matter.

No it won't. If it did it wouldn't have a snowballs chance in hell of getting significant usage. It lets pooling for payments be operated separately from the consensus -- which does mean that you could still pool payments in a fairly traditional way while running off your own node, but it doesn't require you run your own (nor could it really).  After talking to multiple large miners (tens of MW of mining) who have _never_ run a Bitcoin wallet (they just have their pools pay directly to an exchange account) I think the potential of this is easily overstated, but it's just the right (better even) thing to do.  Combined with other efforts to lower node operational costs we might see some more independence there but I wouldn't hold my breath for a rapid change. :)

I didn't cited anything, I'm talking about the core design principles, the basics.

Basically,the network security is a direct result of impracticality of collusion between participants because of their divergence in terms of interests, and topological distribution. It is not up to Satoshi Nakamoto and his whitepaper to decide about it: less participants, more collusion potentials and the Byzantine generals would possibly commit a treason.

If Satoshi Nakamoto, hypothetically had suggested any other security model for bitcoin, it would never become popular and considered secure. Bitcoin security model is based on decentralization which is guaranteed by collusion resistance which in turn is not achievable in a network with few participants.

What? It is so opportunistic  ;D
Just because Satoshi has said something wrong in favor of you, it is citable in the context of a discussion about the most essential features of bitcoin?

Which altcoin did what design change "along the lines' of my proposal?

As of my knowledge, PoW has always been vulnerable to pooling pressure no matter which coin, it has always been based on winner_takes_all approach which I have thoroughly proved its variance drawbacks and inevitability of pooling pressure due to it. I am not aware of any altcoin implementing any alternative variant like what I have proposed.

Greg, you are a prominent figure in the community, kinda political figure I suppose, and should be more careful about what you say imo.

It is not what we are used to hear, confirming the existence of a "problem" by a lead developer (and what problem? Centralization of mining!) and denouncing any responsibility or even possibility for confronting it or claiming that it is not "the origin" of every problem!

It is the origin of the problem under discussion in this topic, isn't it?

It was the origin of delaying SW for an age. Wasn't it?

It is the main factor behind the slow down in adoption of bitcoin by masses and the price being driven by speculative gamblers rather than decent business use cases. Isn't it?

What other problem do you mean Greg that is so independently important?

Nullified? Nope, I have to disagree. If I help to fund someone to run a full node on my behalf, it still adds value to the community. <albeit if it can be verified that the person is actually running the node> I have previously donated old harddrives and computers from our work to friends of mine, to configure as full nodes. <I helped to configure it and it is running from their home networks>

If every merchant ran their own full node, then we would not be worried about the decentralization of the network, but these cheapskates just wants to leech from other people, that are willing to sacrifice some bandwidth/hardware for this purpose.

I have even managed to provide some hardware and software support for one of our local bars, to run their own full node. <In exchange, I get some free drinks, when we go there for our Bitcoin meetups>  ;D  

What value are you referring to specifically? I'm especially interested in what value you see being provided beyond the one or more that they're already running (perhaps for someone else)?

I think the adoption of bitcoin is much more important than the price. The price isnt important isn't relevant, except for a few individuals who wants to get  rich.

Especulation about the price is not a problem. In a few years the price will stabilize (with larger adoption),and the volatility we have now won't matter.

I did not say you specifically, I was saying some people in general. Maybe those people especially from the Bitcoin Cash community. Haha.

I'm also not implying that it's anything wrong, but maybe we should move on from "religious" dogma.


I believe it would be very unfair for anyone to let adoption be a burden on the shoulders of the Core developers. You want adoption? Then build tools on top of Bitcoin.

Well, I should say all additional full nodes being run, would add some more redundancy. ??? When other nodes goes down and there are backup nodes, then that adds some value, right?

One of my friends have several shops in a franchise setting and each of these satellite sites have their own bandwidth and separate network. We are working on adding full nodes in each branch.   ;)  <All in different locations and states>

Tell your friend that his nodes would add more "value" to the network if those nodes in each of his shops are utilized for the acceptance of Bitcoin as payment.

There are on the order of 10,000 reachable nodes. So we already have ~10,000x redundancy, adding more doesn't seem like much of a value. Also, I was mostly trying to ask about someone already running one or more nodes adding an additional one-- the additional one probably goes down if the rest due, so the addition is not much value.

There are plenty of reasons for people to run bitcoin nodes-- better security, better privacy...  but not really any gain in having a hosting party run multiple.

I cannot see why the addition of more nodes could be worthless, even if we have 10 000+ nodes already. Software are corruptible and some OS is very volatile and unreliable, so node counts will go up and down as these nodes fail. <Due to hardware & software losses>

Then again, I agree with your point about an individual hosting multiple nodes in one location. <Not what I suggested> Thank you for the civil discussion on this topic, some people would just force their opinion, without even considering the pros and cons of alternative ideas.  ;)  

If you continue doing this --> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377345.0 people in 3rd world countries will not have an excuse to run full nodes. Thanks.  ;)

Plus the Bitcoin network by design should really be scaling up, not down.


You should also be an "active node". Have your family and friends connect their SPV wallets to your node, or use the node for your own transactions hosted in hardware that you control.

Running a node in AWS is a "passive node", and it's useless.


That is real scaling. This community has been manipulated by the "scaling debate" to believe that Bitcoin's biggest problem is its block size. Bitcoin's biggest problem is latency.