Anecdotally I've seen two primary reasons posed for not running a node:

1) For enthusiasts who want to altruistically run a node at home, it's usually a bandwidth / quality of service problem. There are tools to help work around this, but most users aren't sysadmins and would prefer a simple configuration option in bitcoind and a slider / selector in the QT client to throttle the total bandwidth usage. This issue has been open for years: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/273 - if you want to make it easier for enthusiasts to run nodes, I'd start there.

2) For businesses, it's not so much an issue with the resources of installing / running / maintaining a node, it's an issue with the lack of indexing options offered by bitcoind. Thus the business will also need to run their own indexing solution - an out-of-the-box solution such as Insight or Toshi might work, but for more custom indexing you have to roll your own software - this is where it actually becomes expensive.

Depending upon the query volume / latency needs of the business, it may not make sense to bother administering bitcoind instances, the indexing software, and its databases - using a third party API will probably be more efficient.

- Jameson

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:50 PM, Gavin Andresen via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> 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


_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev