Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Fwd: Block size following technological growth

From: Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 13:50:00 -0400

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> If the incentives for running a node don't weight up against the
> cost/difficulty using a full node yourself for a majority of people in the
> ecosystem, I would argue that there is a problem. As Bitcoin's fundamental
> improvement over other systems is the lack of need for trust, I believe
> that with increased adoption should also come an increased (in absolute
> terms) incentive for people to use a full node. I'm seeing the opposite
> trend, and that is worrying IMHO.

Are you saying that unless the majority of people in the ecosystem decide
to trust nothing but the genesis block hash (decide to run a full node)
there is a problem?

If so, then we do have a fundamental difference of opinion, but I've
misunderstood how you think about trust/centralization/convenience
tradeoffs in the past.

I believe people in the Bitcoin ecosystem will choose different tradeoffs,
and I believe that is OK-- people should be free to make those tradeoffs.

And given that the majority of people in the ecosystem were deciding that
using a centralized service or an SPV-level-security wallet was better even
two or three years ago when blocks were tiny (I'd have to go back and dig
up number-of-full-nodes and number-of-active-wallets at the big web-wallet
providers, but I bet there were an order of magnitude more people using
centralized services than running full nodes even back then), I firmly
believe that block size has very little to do with the decision to run a
full node or not.

-- 
--
Gavin Andresen