Show Posts
What would be a realistic, practical, nobrainer solution that I am sure will quickly be thought of if this ever becomes a problem, is a few honest nodes with a lot of bandwidth and an interest in the success of Bitcoin as a whole, will publish their IP's and say "Connect to me". You as a client can connect to as many nodes as you want, but you only really need one well-connected node to talk to the majority of the network, and then...zzzz....business as usual.
Why isn't the same argument of "relying on altruists" applied to mining as well? We can take your line of thinking and ask oruselves "Why pay miners"? After all, a small bunch of people interested in the currency will contribute all the resources one needs to verify transactions.
The problem with this argument is that if transaction authentication is left in the hands of a few, they can exploit the system in order to make money. The same applies to transaction propagation: If a few nodes control the flow of information to the entire miner network they can exploit the system for their own benefits.
Bitcoin's great leap is that it incentivizes many miners that keep tabs on each other. We simply argue that it should similarly incentivize a large diversity of transaction distribution channels. Just like anyone can make money by mining, we think that everyone should be able to make money from transaction propagation. This inherently breaks any possible monopoly.
It's true that the solution we offer is not without costs. Most of the increase in block sizes is due to the fact that we esentially "micro-pay" each node for each successful transaction relay, and each payment is saved individually in the blocks. In contrast to that, mining is easier to reward -- only one miner per block. I suspect that it's not impossible to pay for several relaying actions at once as well, and that the associated increase in block size can be reduced (perhaps only reward nodes for relaying in some probabilistic manner using a form of lottery and then there will be less need to remember entire referal chains).
If you really want to write a paper on a real weakness of Bitcoin as currently implemented, what you really should pursue is the fact that bitcoin's resource consumption increases exponentially as transaction volume increases linearly, and that it's likely to see a scenario where it bursts in popularity for some reason and then suddenly becomes almost completely unusable (Gnutella style) because it is being crushed under its own weight.
I don't see where there is an exponential increase in resource consumption from a linear increase in volume. Could you elaborate?
