On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Me via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Have you talk to them? If not, how can you be sure they don’t run large number of standard nodes and actually make the network stronger? Personally I never bring claims like this if I just assume. A lot of people in the community really trust you, do you realize you potentially hurt them for no reason?

Running normal full nodes only provides extra service to nodes synchronizing and lightweight clients. It does not "make the network stronger" in the sense that it does not reduce the trust the participants need to have in each other.

It's such a misconception that running many nodes somehow helps. It's much better that you run and control one or a few full nodes which you actually use to validate your transactions, than to run 1000s of nodes in third party datacenters. The latter only looks more decentralized.

Pieter