Will there ever be any monetary incentives to run a full node?

[jiamijiang]

Will there ever be any monetary incentives to run a full node? Why was this never implemented from the start?

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[ranochigo]

No. Full nodes shouldn't be compensated. Unlike POW for the miners, there isn't any trustless way to validate if a full node is contributing (nor any suitable metric to gauge) to the network. Whilst it does help to decentralise the network more, it doesn't offer much more tangible benefits which warrants a compensation.

I don't foresee having a declining node count to be THAT big of a problem given that many volunteer's like me are running full nodes at home still with our old HDD and a Raspberry Pi. The overheads are a lot lower than what others perceive.

[Karartma1]

Will there ever be any monetary incentives to run a full node? Why was this never implemented from the start?

I agree with ranochigo.
The advantages of mining (given the right hardware setup) come in the form of coin rewards. While there are no monetary incentives, running a full node comes with its own benefits. First of all, it increases the security of transactions we perform(good for reliability, privacy and security). I believe this is of the highest importance if you plan to conduct multiple bitcoin txs per day. Secondly, running a node, you contribute to the overall security of bitcoin’s network. With a full node you will always be connected with the latest block chain history sharing that knowledge with your connected peers.
So, no monetary incentives but many benefits!

[BrewMaster]

whenever you think of a change or a new feature, etc. you should mainly think about the dishonest people not the honest ones. in this case rewarding full nodes means any dishonest person can start up hundreds of nodes with very little effort and cost to get all that reward for himself.
now you have to think of a way to prevent this type of fraud. it can only be prevented to some extent and only with a hard fork to change the mining algorithm.
now you are left with a new algorithm that has other flaws in it making it less safe ergo making bitcoin insecure.
and the issues keep on piling on, and for what? to pay people to run full nodes? there are already thousands of them doing it for free.

[bitmover]

The biggest problem is ;
Who would pay them?

Who would control abuses?

There is a delicate economic balance between miners, fees, transactions (which are already expensive), block rewards,  halving etc..

[gmaxwell]

Will there ever be any monetary incentives to run a full node? Why was this never implemented from the start?

Your incentive is that you are more secure and private if you do so.

If there were some other kind of incentive it would just by sybil attacked:  people would spin up thousands of "nodes", which would contribute nothing the network needs-- and would probably not actually be nodes in any case, just to collect the incentive.

[NotATether]

The biggest problem is ;
Who would pay them?

Who would control abuses?

There is a delicate economic balance between miners, fees, transactions (which are already expensive), block rewards,  halving etc..

There are 10987 full nodes according to bitnodes, so even if you pay a small potatoes amount of money like 0.00001BTC, after paying all those nodes you will be out by more than 0.1BTC every period. Nobody's willing to finance that.

Even if some entity which I will call a "creditor" could pay them all, you can't just take any receiving address of a full node for some hypothetical creditor to send rewards to. Full nodes are just private wallets that have the whole blockchain, and there are privacy concerns with sharing one of your addresses to some creditor because the rewards will be broadcasted on the blockchain and everyone will know the address is associated with your node.

Some nodes even have the wallet functionality disabled so there are no bitcoin addresses associated with them to pay to.

[pooya87]

There are 10987 full nodes according to bitnodes,

those are only reachable nodes, the majority of bitcoin nodes (90%) are not reachable or in other words don't accept incoming connections hence they are not listed on sites like bitnodes. take a look here: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html

[NotATether]

There are 10987 full nodes according to bitnodes,

those are only reachable nodes, the majority of bitcoin nodes (90%) are not reachable or in other words don't accept incoming connections hence they are not listed on sites like bitnodes. take a look here: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html

There's no point in rewarding a full node that isn't accepting inbound connections anyway. Such an incentive is supposed to be encouraging people to leave more full nodes running for serving connections. If a reward system were to give offline nodes rewards then it would be no different from giving everyone with a wallet free money.

[Carlton Banks]

There are 10987 full nodes according to bitnodes,

those are only reachable nodes, the majority of bitcoin nodes (90%) are not reachable or in other words don't accept incoming connections hence they are not listed on sites like bitnodes. take a look here: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html

ot: although the number of reachable nodes may increase radically (and rather suddenly) if the NAT-PMP port-forwarding pr is merged into Bitcoin 22.0, although this was also an the 21.0 milestone and got pushed out into 22.0, not sure why

[gmaxwell]

ot: although the number of reachable nodes may increase radically (and rather suddenly) if the NAT-PMP port-forwarding pr is merged into Bitcoin 22.0, although this was also an the 21.0 milestone and got pushed out into 22.0, not sure why

Because contributors are focused on debating which month to drop support for no longer supported mac os versions rather than sticking their neck out working on features which actually do something, and therefore might have bugs that get them blasted by internet assholes.

[odolvlobo]

Will there ever be any monetary incentives to run a full node? Why was this never implemented from the start?

There is nothing preventing a node from charging a fee to access it.

[zeuner]

[...] to pay people to run full nodes? there are already thousands of them doing it for free.

It's indeed practically meaningless for the original Bitcoin network as it kept a reasonable block size. But making a full node incentive part of the economic protocol might help to find proper responses to the block size controversy. It might make it more obvious that too high block sizes make it too expensive to have a healthy level of full node decentralization.

[ranochigo]

Even if you find way to pay full node which are very difficult to abuse and without locking big amount of Bitcoin, it won't solve block size controversy.
Without changing total bitcoin supply, each node only get very small amount of Bitcoin (which already mentioned above) and it won't cover cost of running full node.

Indeed. Bitnode used to implement a lottery system which rewards roughly $10 to a few selected winners once a week/month. There were hundreds of nodes and it was still when the blockchain was still fairly small.

Did it really incentivise that many people to create a Bitcoin Node? Not really, the result was fairly consistent and it didn't really increase the nodes substantially. It was paid for fully by them and it was barely enough to cover a month of fees. If it was any more attractive, I bet someone would've found a way to spoof their nodes and trick their crawler. Don't think anyone really cares about incentivising them/wants to fund it after that.

[pawanjain]

There are 10987 full nodes according to bitnodes, so even if you pay a small potatoes amount of money like 0.00001BTC, after paying all those nodes you will be out by more than 0.1BTC every period. Nobody's willing to finance that.

10987 should be the current number of active full nodes accepting incoming connections. Just imagine how large this number will be when people get to know there are incentives for running a full node. I am quite sure this number would grow 10x times or more if incentivizing full nodes become true. So that would become around 1 BTC or more and obviously nobody would contribute that amount repeatedly.

[aliashraf]

OP has crafted the question thoughtfully:

S/he is not asking whether THERE IS any incentive but if THERE WILL BE  such incentive ever. Obviously other than what @gmaxwell has mentioned almost correctly, securing one's own assets there IS no direct financial incentive for running a bitcoin full-node in the current state of the technology either for bitcoin or for any other POW coin. But this fact doesn't prove anything about the potentials of POW cryptocurrencies in general.

That said, one needs to remain focused on the main agenda of bitcoin and its clone: building/developing a decentralized p2p electronic cash, recognizing how critical it is to have the number of active full-nodes as high as possible to serve this sacred cause: decentralization.

So, I formulate the op's question as follows:
Is there any technical solution for a POW based coin to incentivize installing and maintaining active full-nodes preferably without disrupting the whole bitcoin technology?

As a matter of fact, investigating pooling pressure and mining centralization threats in bitcoin I've become convinced that an affirmative approach to the above question is inevitable in the framework of any solid solution to the core problem of mining centralization.

[pooya87]

As a matter of fact, investigating pooling pressure and mining centralization threats in bitcoin I've become convinced that an affirmative approach to the above question is inevitable in the framework of any solid solution to the core problem of mining centralization.

I don't see how paying full nodes some sort of reward for running could have any effects on mining and mining pools. That just adds an additional reason to centralized another aspect of bitcoin (running a full node) and if we assume there were any centralization in mining the same entities would also run full nodes and take the control in that area also.

[aliashraf]

As a matter of fact, investigating pooling pressure and mining centralization threats in bitcoin I've become convinced that an affirmative approach to the above question is inevitable in the framework of any solid solution to the core problem of mining centralization.

I don't see how paying full nodes some sort of reward for running could have any effects on mining and mining pools. That just adds an additional reason to centralized another aspect of bitcoin (running a full node) and if we assume there were any centralization in mining the same entities would also run full nodes and take the control in that area also.

I didn't suggest that, paying rewards to full-nodes. I'm just reminding the fact that the main incentive behind running a full node was designed to be a strict requirement for participating in mining which is absolutely omitted with the current situation in the scene. If instead of tens of pools we had thousands of miners actively generating their own blocks, i.e. in a truly decentralized mining scene the actual value of running a full node would have been discovered already. Decentralization of mining is the key to this problem.

[zeuner]

[...] to pay people to run full nodes? there are already thousands of them doing it for free.

It's indeed practically meaningless for the original Bitcoin network as it kept a reasonable block size. But making a full node incentive part of the economic protocol might help to find proper responses to the block size controversy. It might make it more obvious that too high block sizes make it too expensive to have a healthy level of full node decentralization.

Even if you find way to pay full node which are very difficult to abuse and without locking big amount of Bitcoin, it won't solve block size controversy.
Without changing total bitcoin supply, each node only get very small amount of Bitcoin (which already mentioned above) and it won't cover cost of running full node.

Yes, the fixed mining reward distorts the incentivization too much to properly investigate appropriate rewards for running a full node. But the same problem applies to transaction fees. It is crucial to solve both issues before the mining reward approaches zero.

[TofuDefi]

As a matter of fact, investigating pooling pressure and mining centralization threats in bitcoin I've become convinced that an affirmative approach to the above question is inevitable in the framework of any solid solution to the core problem of mining centralization.

I don't see how paying full nodes some sort of reward for running could have any effects on mining and mining pools. That just adds an additional reason to centralized another aspect of bitcoin (running a full node) and if we assume there were any centralization in mining the same entities would also run full nodes and take the control in that area also.

I didn't suggest that, paying rewards to full-nodes. I'm just reminding the fact that the main incentive behind running a full node was designed to be a strict requirement for participating in mining which is absolutely omitted with the current situation in the scene. If instead of tens of pools we had thousands of miners actively generating their own blocks, i.e. in a truly decentralized mining scene the actual value of running a full node would have been discovered already. Decentralization of mining is the key to this problem.

Many businesses need full node, not only miners. Payment providers, exchanges, etc. And it's not so expensive to have one.