Bitcoin Forum

in a message from 2015 or 16 during the big block debate an email that may or may not be satoshi published an article talking about among many things the need to financially incentive full nodes. what would be the potiental issues with having say 3% of the mining fee and reward going to full nodes on any network not just bitcoin

I expect instant centralization of nodes. Let me spin up a million of them in the cloud to grab that quarter million bucks per day.

There are currently over 10K bitcoin nodes at the moment according to https://bitnodes.io/ and that number would explode for sure if rewards will be distributed to them. It seems fair to give rewards since running a node also requires electricity and internet cost to help secure the network but, as LoyceMobile implied, many of these nodes will be owned and controlled by a few rich individuals or companies.

It's probably best to make centralization more difficult to achieve by leaving the transaction fees we spend at the hands of people who incurs the most cost or expenses, the miners. Lessening their rewards may lead to less miners.

Probably this. Especially knowing that running full nodes pretty much only mostly requires computer memory and internet bandwidth; it isn't farfetched to think that a lot of people would be running a lot of instances to incentivize themselves more.

You already have an incentive to run a full node - it offers better privacy and prevents some attacks, like that Electrum bug that allowed malicious servers to show users warnings asking them to update to a new version, which was actually a malicious wallet. Not every incentive needs to be financial.

I like the following argument regarding financial incentives to run a full node: full node helps to protect your investments in bitcoin. If you believe that bitcoin will succeed, you invested a lot of money expecting its price to grow significantly, you are now probably interested in protecting your investments. The only efficient way to protect investments in bitcoin is supporting the network. Bitcoin is valuable because it is decentralized, trustless, indestructible. There is no single point of failure in bitcoin, because nodes are distributed across the world and provide sustainability of qualities that make bitcoin valuable. You don't need additional financial incentives to run a full node, because you already have the most important ones: full node helps to protect your investments, preserve your wealth, with full node it is possible to become financially independent. What else do you need? Like LoyceV correctly said, other incentives will lead to centralization meaning the loss in network value.

definitely was not Satoshi.

that would be the PoS design which is also severely flawed and opens up a lot of new attack surface. the biggest incentive for running a full node is financial sovereignty and people have never been running full nodes to make money.

there is no relationship between turning completeness of scripts (which is useless in a currency) and size of the blockchain.

the difference is that a miner has to make a big investment to buy equipment and spend money mining bitcoin while taking risks. running a full node doesn't cost nearly as much money and it is super easy to run hundreds with very little cost!

Yeah, it's a pretty neat idea.
Let's give some money to people for "securing" the network, allowing companies or individuals to earn more while running those nodes thus financing their business, to end up with a few guys owning 80% of the nodes in a few server farms. We didn't have enough issues, not let's fund somebody who could then launch a Sybil attack, after all with bitmain getting close to almost monopolize mining gear manufacturing proved no issue yet, why don't we fuck something else also.

And, I really want to see how those payments would be made.
With miners, it's simple , one tx, with 50 000 nodes that wold be pretty interesting, let's just the capacity of the network by 1/8, we have more than we need after all /s

Full nodes are integral to doing business with bitcoin. We don't need to incentivise people to run full nodes making them analogous to masternodes in case of other such centralized coins. The unsaid roadmap towards incentives is greater merchant adoption and implementation of LN. The incentive will be for well-connected LN nodes in the form of routing fees.

The reason why this is not being implemented is because someone can take advantage of the incentives and install a lot of full nodes just to collect the profits. While that isn't a bad idea, imagine nodes being too centralized that the purpose of peer-to-peer relay of things is defeated once it reaches the hub of these nodes owned and operated by a single person/entity/organization. It's not going to end well, and there might be rare cases wherein nodes can go 'rogue' and disrupt the flow of transactions within the network.

i see your point i was mostly talking about coins like ethereum whos blockchain is far bigger then bitcoins and will most likley keep growing. but i agree with everyone else the biggest issue i see is someone spinning up a bunch of nodes and then controling the network i was just wondering if there is way to prevent that

yeah i see that as the main issue the thing is as more people join that 3% or whatever number would be split amoung more and more people until the finacal incentive is mute the issue is we dont really know how many of those nodes are owned by diffrent people but i think for chains larger then bitcoin like ethereum there needs to be some system that allows for terrabytes of data

Firstly, it would require a hard fork. You know that doesn't resonate well with some people and it would inevitable lead to parties supporting/opposing it.

Anyways, I would expect botnets to have tailored malwares if that would ever occur. It's also quite a problem to determine if a node is truly helping the network or just collecting the incentives. It's not possible/resource intensive to make sure everyone is actually running a node (ie. not just serving the block when asked or just broadcasting their useragent without having any blocks in reality, etc). I don't expect to see this happening at all; Bitcoin works fine as it is now and centralisation is not the greatest problem that we have in terms of having people run validating node (pruned or not).