Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Full node "tip" function

From: Erik Aronesty <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 May 2017 09:15:02 -0400

> Greg
> The primary result would be paying people to sybil attack the network.

I cannot imagine the benefit to replicating an ip address in this case,
except maybe you think that you would be more likely to be selected as a
peer?   But there would be no actual advantage since download peers are
selected based on throughput and actual blocks served.

Also, since this makes the network far more resistant to DDOS attacks, it
has added benefits.

> Luke:
> paying for services is in general a great idea, but one that Bitcoin
> can much better serve once Lightning is in production.

I agree, if lightning networks were baked in, then the tips could be as
granular as "per block downloaded", or even (outlandish seeming now, but
maybe not in a future where there is a "public rpc api") "per rpc call".
Miners and business users would certainly pay for high quality services.
Spinning up new nodes without a tip and relying on the "free network" would
probably take more time, for example.

I suspect that if income were even a small possibility the number of full
nodes would vastly increase.

Sybil attacks seem irrelevant as long as reasonable QOS metrics are stored
per peer.

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 5:53 PM, Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 9:08 PM, Erik Aronesty via bitcoin-dev
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > CONS:
>
> The primary result would be paying people to sybil attack the network.
> It's far cheaper to run one node behind thousands of IPs than it is to
> run many nodes.
>
> Suggestions like this have come up many times before.
>