Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Small Nodes: A Better Alternative to Pruned Nodes

From: Angel Leon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2017 13:47:40 +0000

>Financially incentivising nodes is a really weird area because it would
allow someone to essentially automate the deployment of nodes. i.e. if a
node can pay for itself 100% (even at a lesser value, it just becomes
cheaper overall), you could write an application that uses an AWS API or a
digital ocean API to automatically deploy 100's of nodes. Which sounds
great but not if that person is malicious and wants to prevent the
community adopting proposals.

what other projects have done to avoid such attacks (while incentivizing
economically running full nodes) is to only distribute part of the block
rewards back such nodes if that node has committed/frozen a predetermined
amount of coins that can't be spent. This also leaves less liquidity for
market speculation and a incentives for long term commitments.

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 5:14 AM udevNull via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> I'd like to add to this. There is definitely a barrier of entry with
> regards to setting up a full node. Unless you're living in a first world
> country, the bandwidth requirements alone, will outright prevent you from
> even setting up a full node (sync since genesis).
>
> To maintain that also becomes a sunk cost, as there is no financial
> incentive to run a node, only an idealogical one. Most of the people who
> benefit and will benefit from Bitcoin, are the un-banked. Which you will
> find in 3rd world countries, that don't have ISPs that provide the data
> packages, to cater for the requirements of running a full node. I'm sure
> many would like to, but simply cannot afford it.
>
> A user may not want to run a node at home, but rather on a digital ocean
> or AWS server, which they cannot afford to do either considering the
> bandwidth and storage costs associated with it. However, I don't think they
> should be excluded from participating in the network (supporting proposals,
> voicing their opinions, running their own wallets, writing their own
> applications on top of Bitcoin [which I think is extremely important]).
>
> So I would definitely be in favour of a small node of sorts. It will
> present us with some interesting technical challenges along the way but
> it's definitely worth while looking into.
>
> Financially incentivising nodes is a really weird area because it would
> allow someone to essentially automate the deployment of nodes. i.e. if a
> node can pay for itself 100% (even at a lesser value, it just becomes
> cheaper overall), you could write an application that uses an AWS API or a
> digital ocean API to automatically deploy 100's of nodes. Which sounds
> great but not if that person is malicious and wants to prevent the
> community adopting proposals.
> Just my 2 cents worth.
>
>
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>
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