One person controlling multiple nodes is bad?

[AverageGlabella]

We all know the benefits of running a node and how much it does to secure both yourself and the network. I have recently made a thread to encourage newbies to run nodes and to treat it as an investment just like they would buying Bitcoin. This is the post However I have been thinking about the possibility of one person controlling more than one node and how that is bad for the network I think I have seen it before when people are encouraging others to have as many full nodes as they can to support the network. But does this not come with a price of centralizing the network because one person controls several nodes?

We should be encouraging more people to run nodes rather than encouraging more nodes.

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[goddog]

We all know the benefits of running a node and how much it does to secure both yourself and the network. I have recently made a thread to encourage newbies to run nodes and to treat it as an investment just like they would buying Bitcoin. This is the post However I have been thinking about the possibility of one person controlling more than one node and how that is bad for the network I think I have seen it before when people are encouraging others to have as many full nodes as they can to support the network. But does this not come with a price of centralizing the network because one person controls several nodes?

We should be encouraging more people to run nodes rather than encouraging more nodes.

You should run a node for you, not to help the network.
A lot of people is currently running more than one node. It does not centralize the network.

[cellard]

It's not necessarily bad, but it could mislead the rest of the network into thinking, "oh well, we have enough nodes, I will not bother setting one myself". We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

If a single person has a ton of nodes, that is a single point of failure, and you want to avoid single point of failures in decentralized networks.

[goddog]

It's not necessarily bad, but it could mislead the rest of the network into thinking, "oh well, we have enough nodes, I will not bother setting one myself". We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

If a single person has a ton of nodes, that is a single point of failure, and you want to avoid single point of failures in decentralized networks.

actually there are like 90k nodes, how many people or corporations are behind them? I hope no more than 10k.
I hope pools,exchanges, blockchain explorers and online wallets runs an high number of nodes each.

[AverageGlabella]

You should run a node for you, not to help the network.
A lot of people is currently running more than one node. It does not centralize the network.

You should run a node for both yourself (privacy) and to help secure the network.

It's not necessarily bad, but it could mislead the rest of the network into thinking, "oh well, we have enough nodes, I will not bother setting one myself". We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

If a single person has a ton of nodes, that is a single point of failure, and you want to avoid single point of failures in decentralized networks.

That is my thinking and wanting to make sure that I was not missing anything obvious.

actually there are like 90k nodes, how many people or corporations are behind them? I hope no more than 10k.
I hope pools,exchanges, blockchain explorers and online wallets runs an high number of nodes each.

Where are you getting this information from? AFAIK only the amount of listening nodes are known and that might not even be a accurate number.

[goddog]

Where are you getting this information from? AFAIK only the amount of listening nodes are known and that might not even be a accurate number.

I don't know if it is accurate, but it is realistic.
http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html

you can see the IP there:
http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/seeds.txt (160mb file)

[hatshepsut93]

We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

I don't see any problems with people running multiple nodes, there are some benefits to running more than one node, it makes a user more resistant to certain attacks that involve Sybil nodes that try to isolate the victim from the rest of the network. And your argument with corporations is taking it to the extreme, I feel like the network with 12,000 nodes were every user has 4 nodes is slightly more secure than the network with 3,000 nodes with one node per user, as long as majority of users are honest, because it would be harder to attack the bigger network.

[AverageGlabella]

We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

I don't see any problems with people running multiple nodes, there are some benefits to running more than one node, it makes a user more resistant to certain attacks that involve Sybil nodes that try to isolate the victim from the rest of the network. And your argument with corporations is taking it to the extreme, I feel like the network with 12,000 nodes were every user has 4 nodes is slightly more secure than the network with 3,000 nodes with one node per user, as long as majority of users are honest, because it would be harder to attack the bigger network.

Owning more than a 1 node is sort of like buying shares in a company. The company being the network of Bitcoin and the shares being the nodes. If shares are divided among a lot of people we should be able to determine a much better consensus than if nodes were controlled by only a select few. Cellard just made an example and made it a little more clear by giving extreme examples even if we reduced the numbers its not likely to have any effect is only a few people have a couple of nodes. But its the principle that more people operating nodes is better than more nodes among lesser people. a few people that own a large amount of nodes is sort of adding to the centralized. I'm not saying that it makes it centralized only more so. If the NSA had a few hundred nodes this would be much more of a threat than if they had 10.

People who run nodes are ultimately who decide what fork to go with when a hard fork occurs. We need proper consensus and not someone who has the same ideas but get several votes. This is why you are only allowed to vote once in elections to avoid this issue. 

[hatshepsut93]

People who run nodes are ultimately who decide what fork to go with when a hard fork occurs. We need proper consensus and not someone who has the same ideas but get several votes. This is why you are only allowed to vote once in elections to avoid this issue. 

On a protocol level, everyone decides for themselves which branch to follow after a fork, Bitcoin is not a democracy, it's pure voluntaryism. On a social level, it's pretty complex, because lots of factors are in play - hashrate, community support, node count, developer support, opinions of prominent people, exchange stance, etc. And even then it's kinda subjective, since there's already Bcash people who seriously believe that their coin is the real Bitcoin, and there's nothing that can change their mind.

[cellard]

We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

I don't see any problems with people running multiple nodes, there are some benefits to running more than one node, it makes a user more resistant to certain attacks that involve Sybil nodes that try to isolate the victim from the rest of the network. And your argument with corporations is taking it to the extreme, I feel like the network with 12,000 nodes were every user has 4 nodes is slightly more secure than the network with 3,000 nodes with one node per user, as long as majority of users are honest, because it would be harder to attack the bigger network.

It's debatable I think. Same amount of users, higher node count... assuming perfect distribution of each user running 4 nodes which is impossible but for theory's sake. I guess it would give a single user extra protection if they only run a single node, but on the cons side, you may disincentive people that are on the verge of running a node because they see an high node count and feel comfort with that, like I said before ("there are 12,000 nodes, that's a decent amount I think I will pass" vs "there are only 3,000 nodes, I will run one myself"). The corporation explain I made was to use an extreme case and that's ultimately what big blocks route would lead Bitcoin at.

[Jet Cash]

I run three nodes, but not 24/7. Two use the same wallet, so that gives me a backup. The other has a different wallet so that all my bits are not in one basket.

[Ucy]

It is probably thesame thing as one Node as far as a single Blockchain is concerned.  I think it is even safer to have every individual operate one Node. A single person controlling the total number of Bitcoin Node means Bitcoin still has one Node.

Multiple Nodes maybe OK if a honest person is running it but dangerous if run by bad person. So it is better to just stick with one Node so we know exactly what we are dealing with

[odolvlobo]

It's not necessarily bad, but it could mislead the rest of the network into thinking, "oh well, we have enough nodes, I will not bother setting one myself". We want to ideally have 1 node per person (and many people running nodes), this strengthens the network. 1000000 nodes in the hands of a couple of corporations is less secure than 1000 nodes spread all over the world, by individual parties that don't know each other.

If a single person has a ton of nodes, that is a single point of failure, and you want to avoid single point of failures in decentralized networks.

But a single person running multiple nodes is no more of a single point of failure than a single person running one node.

[aliashraf]

Aren't you guys tired of this nonsense?

A node, not connected to a mining facility, has nothing to do with security of the network.
It is about the security of the owner and it won't help significantly to run multiple non-mining nodes for one person's security, just a more fault tolerance which is not important because sync process is asynchronous and the node can catch up quickly after reboot.

So, what's going on in this thread and about what you are wasting your time and ours?