Total Number of full nodes operating. Less than 10k.

[Wind_FURY]

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.

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.

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.

[aliashraf]

Well Ive been reading this thread over and I don't quite understand what is the purpose of running a node?

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.

[Wind_FURY]

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?

[aliashraf]

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.

[DooMAD]

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.  

[aliashraf]

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.  

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?

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.  

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.
 
 

[DooMAD]

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.  

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?

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.

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.

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.

[Stedsm]

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?

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

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.

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?

[aliashraf]

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.

[gmaxwell]

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.

[aliashraf]

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?

[RGBKey]

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?

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.

[bitmover]

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?

[Rath_]

Is it so bad to use a pruned blockchain?

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

It's much more difficult to change historical blocks, and it becomes exponentially more difficult the further back you go. As above, changing historical blocks only allows you to exclude and change the ordering of transactions. If miners rewrite historical blocks too far back, then full nodes with pruning enabled will be unable to continue, and will shut down; the network situation would then probably need to be untangled manually (eg. by updating the software to reject this chain even though it is longer).

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.

[Wind_FURY]

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.

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".

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.

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

[gmaxwell]

We cannot always make citations on the white paper because Bitcoin has already developed further beyond "Satoshi's vision".

on this point you can, in particular the white paper pointed out that nodes should be run for independent security (last sentence of section 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.

It will make miners run their own nodes,

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.

[aliashraf]

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.

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".

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.

We cannot always make citations on the white paper because Bitcoin has already developed further beyond "Satoshi's vision".

on this point you can ...

What? It is so opportunistic 
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?

...  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.

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.

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.

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?

[Kakmakr]

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?

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.

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>    

[gmaxwell]

If I help to fund someone to run a full node on my behalf, it still adds value to the community.

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)?

[bitmover]

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?

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.