I suspect we need a better incentive for users to run nodes (c)

[jc12345]

I am more a business person than a technocrat, but with normal companies if data, like accounting records, becomes too much it gets archived. Data becoming too big is a universal problem and not something unique to Bitcoin. Neither can Bitcoin be expected to solve a physical problem like storage constraints. You then have a live potion of lets say 90 days and an archived portion for alternative interrogation.

If a snapshot is taken of the blockchain with the balances of all the addresses at some point, then the chain can start again and the old portion can be archived and hashed. A complete hash of the archive can be worked into the first block of the live chain to make sure no-one can ever change the archive - the archive then becomes like a block itself. Perhaps the archiving function can be automated in the wallet every 10000 blocks and the wallet can calculate a hash of the archive and this same function can be performed by all the nodes and consensus reached on the hash and included in the next block. The first archive can be a large one and the rest will become incremental archives, just like a backup system.

The archives can be loaded on a few nodes and interrogated by some web interface and even torrented and the live portion can then be widely distributed. Alternatively anyone can interrogate an offline copy of the chain if the hash checks out. The process can be repeated once a year or more frequently if the size of the blocks make the chain grow to fast eg. predetermined number of blocks. This will also open the possibility of making block sizes greater than the proposed 8MB as you just increase the frequency of the archiving to make the max live potion fit the average storage of a wallet device. There will be technicalities to sort out in the abbreviated chain but with all the clever people around I am sure a solution could be found?

[gmaxwell]

Have I misrepresented? He seems to be clearly stating that distributed nodes are a small scale solution with consolidation at scale. That I find depressing and stand by what I said. If I have misinterpreted, then please correct me. The only other interpretation that I can see is he is agreeing with me, that unless clients do the block processing and miners only "generate" coins, then the result will be big server farms as we are seeing now. I think that is a rather wistful reading of the words, however.

Yes, you have, though it's not your fault.  What a client in Bitcoin is has been subverted into something that can't enforce the rules at all and is utterly dependant on trusting miners.  That was never the design of the system.

[Cryptorials]

Just published an article on this subject: http://cryptonewsday.com/bitcoin-is-proving-why-no-crypto-can-survive-without-a-decentralized-governance-structure/

BTW varnish - I mention your post!

I have always thought that running a node should be rewarded in some way. But instead of thinking in charging the users, I was thinking in charging the miners.

My idea was some sort of "pool of nodes", similar to a pool of miners. Imagine that some nodes are part of the pool of nodes, once the miners send the new block mined, the pool of nodes will check if that block has included a "tip" to the pool's address (or may be it is better to call it a fee), and the pool will propagate the block only if the fee is present.

The incentive to the miners for tiping the pool is that there will be a higher risk of their new mined block will not be accepted as good as it could be competing with another block mined by other miner that paid the fee, and it is propagated by the pool A.

But I need to think of it deeply.

[Vanish]

Just published an article on this subject: http://cryptonewsday.com/bitcoin-is-proving-why-no-crypto-can-survive-without-a-decentralized-governance-structure/

BTW varnish - I mention your post!

Thank you!

As I said, I have to think more about it (I'm thinking on pool cheaters part of two different pools and how to control it). And I thought about it because I think the current situation is not fair, miners can get a fair fee for the calculations, but running nodes and propagating miners new blocks is done by some fools who wants to do it for free. I think it is not fair.

I do not agree with some part of your article. In my opinion, on bitcoin we have now clearly a representative democracy system (that, as we say in my home country, doesn't work): we have delegated our votes to the mining pools. It is not true that people who run a full node get to "vote" on bitcoin system. Nobody can buys votes by setting up nodes, because nodes don't vote. We can open posts following the number of XT nodes, create spoofing XT clients or whatever we want. At the end, Gavin only has to convince five or ten people from the mining pools, and his fork will win.

If every node of the network could choose to ban today any new block with a XT flag in the header (not all the blocks in the blockchain, as I think there is one right now for example, just the last one that wants to be propagated), things would be much different, I think. I would find this a more effective (and direct ) way for voting against XT than spoofing. Threating miners to not validate their blocks if they dare to flag it as XT and risking that some other pool without the XT flag will make their block validated would make harder to create a network effect in which every pool starts to mine with the XT flag "just in case".

Yes, I know that we could do it right now, and that could potentially be another extra hard fork issue right now instead of waiting to January to see if Gavin wins, but much more people could take part of this, instead of trusting that 5 people signing a PDFs written in chinese will "represent" ( ) us.

[GingerAle]

From what I've gathered, there was never supposed to be a separation from "nodes" and "miners", so that is the root of the problem. The pooled mining is what facilitated this split in the architecture.

There is an existing option to address this, if anyone in this conversation is mining. Running p2pool is essentially a cooperative solo mining. So, every participant in the p2pool is running a full node and mining on that full node (well, you can mine on someone elses node, but you don't have to). If you find a block, the blockreward is split amongst everyone in the p2pool in accordance to their hashrate (as determined by the share chain, if I'm getting this right). So its more a co-op than a pool. Well, that might not be the right analogy. But the important part is you mine on your own full node, not send shares to some central node.

It's a tough problem, especially now, when the "social contract" of bitcoin has been solidified. Any addition incentive would have to come from the existing pipeline - you couldn't just go in and say "hey now full nodes get part of the block reward".

So one could imagine a new client clone that participates in some node incentive program, but this client would have to be networked with some mining power. I.e., there would be a particular mining pool that diverts X% to nodes running bitcoindi. the i is for incentive.

but thats vaporware / vapornet. Your best bet (as far as I understand it) is p2pool.

and the extreme bummer is that very few altcoins are seriously trying to experiment with the pool problem. The only one I was aware of was spreadcoin, but they went POS and I stopped following.