Interesting way to get millions of people run full nodes.

[Ucy]

I think it's important to have millions of users run their own full nodes without this slowing down anything. The more there are people running their full nodes, the more decentralized Bitcoin is... and more people can monitor the network, be part of Blockchain governance, and have full control of their own funds.

It's difficult to run a full node today, for some reasons I would not want to go into now.
So, I was wondering why not we have many Bitcoin Blockchains on a single Bitcoin network? Is that what sidechain means?  We could have multiple Bitcoin Blockchains of different sizes... Some can be "unlimited" blockchains, meaning no limit to the amount of data that can be stored in them. While  others can be limited, meaning there is limit to the amount of data that can be stored in them. In regards to the Limited Blockchains, the limit of data that can be stored in them can vary from 5gb to 1000gb. Once a limited blockchain is filled up, nothing goes in anymore and it locks automatically.
Anybody should be able to create a new blockchain & set its size limit. If for example I want a smaller blockchain of 5gb or 10gb, I could create that and run it on my phone. then get other interested peers to also also download it. This should help increase the number of people running the full node of that chain in their phones. I can even transfer all my Bitcoin from old blockchains to the new one for easy/full management of my bitcoins. Once this is filled up, I move to other smaller blockchains or create another new chain.

✴Big Nodes
Others users can run the big/medium blockchains as well, if they choose to.  It should also be possible for an individual to run all the existing Bitcoin Blockchains on a single  computer or as a single node.

✳Incentives
Incentive is probably necessary to make this idea work better. else we may have few people running the bigger blockchains or very small numbers of people running multiple/all the blockchains in their computers. A user or Node running multiple Blockchains (or all the Blockchain) on a single computer get more incentives while the smaller nodes get less. Incentives can be in the form of good scores/ratings, virtual valuables/properties, rankings, redeemables, more privileges, "network merit" unique tokens, etc


✳Lots of Interconnected Bitcoin Blockchains.

All the Bitcoin Blockchains would be interconnected (& talking to one another) to form a single  SuperChain or Bitcoin SuperChain... Imagine thousands of Bitcoin SuperChain in the future.

✴Governance
The SuperChain will probably need to share thesame transaction validators or "representatives nodes". The representatives will be made of some users that run multiple/all the nodes. They (representatives) will be monitored by every user running a Bitcoin nodes, including users running small nodes in their phones.   That could translate to millions of nodes monitoring some representatives in the future.

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[amishmanish]

When trying to understand stuff like Sidechains, it is good to read such viewpoints and figure out the differences in your understanding with others. Theoretically, a sidechain will allow you to move bitcoin to a different blockchain, use it there and move it back to main bitcoin blockchain. Moving bitcoin to another blockchain is a complex, non-intuitive process.

The pegged sidechain proposal had a concept of implementing SPV Proofs which needed changes to the bitcoin blockheaders. To avoid this before actual implementation of a sidechain,a federated peg was also suggested in the original sidechain whitepaper. This is the path that was taken in the implementation of Liquid, bitcoin's first sidechain.

When you say having many blockchains, you cannot have many blockchains on the same Bitcoin network, as the network will comprise of nodes that follow the rules of main bitcoin chain and comes to consensus based on those rules. The amount of computation that goes into validating is also dependent on the quality of participants in this network. So you cannot have many bitcoin blockchains on the same network.

[mda]

There are many ways to scale on-chain like
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5109561.
However those millions of people seem to be genuinely uninterested and for now bitcoin is mostly used for trading futures and options by HNWIs.

[Kakmakr]

When you say "big", you refer to the storage space needed to run these nodes, right? Well, the developers answer to people who have limited storage space was already addressed with "Pruned" nodes.

You cannot set a limit on the Blockchain size, because it will render that Blockchain obsolete. What happens with the blocks and transactions once the limit is reached? People cannot simply stop using Bitcoin, because they ran out of disk space.

Your intention is good, but the application of the idea is not practical. You need to find a way for people to selectively configure what part of the Blockchain they want to use <how far back they want to go> and then to reduce the overall space needed, based on the storage they have. 

The problem come in when you need to trace a block or transaction and you do not have the full Blockchain at your command. 

[Theb]

This will only work if people are getting paid when they are running a full node. Unfortunately unlike mining Bitcoin people who run a full node is only running at a cost without really earning anything, they do this voluntarily in order to keep the Bitcoin network up and running. So really this "incentivizing" system is really the one to go if we want to see thousands (not millions) of people starting their own full nodes. But we aren't the problem here since we need someone like a organization or a corporation who is willing to pay people to  run full nodes for Bitcoin, they need to be willing to spend millions of dollars on a monthly basis for these people and just by looking on our current situation I don't see any big corporation doing it not unless there operations are heavily relying on Bitcoin payments.

[squatter]

So, I was wondering why not we have many Bitcoin Blockchains on a single Bitcoin network? Is that what sidechain means?  We could have multiple Bitcoin Blockchains of different sizes... Some can be "unlimited" blockchains, meaning no limit to the amount of data that can be stored in them. While  others can be limited, meaning there is limit to the amount of data that can be stored in them.

Every method of securing those sidechains comes with trade-offs.

If they are secured by Bitcoin miners -- like soft-forked or merge-mined sidechains -- they constitute block size increases. All that sidechain bloat is a big disincentive to running a full node, which defeats your purpose.

If they are secured by federated consensus or are simply altcoin chains, they are irrelevant to the question of Bitcoin nodes. These nodes aren't part of the Bitcoin network.

If you're talking about sharding, then you're reducing "fully validating nodes" to "partially validating nodes." This greatly weakens Bitcoin's security, which is largely based on peer-to-peer redundancy.

[mda]

Unfortunately unlike mining Bitcoin people who run a full node is only running at a cost without really earning anything, they do this voluntarily in order to keep the Bitcoin network up and running.

People invested in bitcoin run full nodes to verify what miners are doing and not to keep some network up and running. There aren't many full nodes because current bitcoin implementation is congested, dysfunctional and unusable as peer-to-peer payment system.

[pooya87]

any kind of monetary incentive can cause more problems than it solves. for starters it will create centralization since someone with more money can easily run lots of nodes and get a lot of that "incentive", soon enough we'll end up seeing most of the network is data centers running hundreds of bitcoin nodes.

in my opinion a bigger problem with bitcoin is that most of the nodes are currently "leechers". last stat i saw was saying there were 100,000 nodes and from that number only 10,800 are also accepting incoming connections which means only 10% of the nodes are contributing to the network and the rest are only "leeching".

[Wind_FURY]

OP, from me, a non-technical person's point of view, and the stupid one in the forum, that sounds like a lot of techno-babble and word salad. No offense.

Plus the problem is not storage, it's bandwidth.