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

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2015 20:52:28 +0200

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 8:43 PM, Michael Naber <[email-masked]> wrote:

> How many nodes are necessary to ensure sufficient network reliability?
> Ten, a hundred, a thousand? At what point do we hit the point of
> diminishing returns, where adding extra nodes starts to have negligible
> impact on the overall reliability of the system?
>

It's not about reliability. There are plenty of nodes currently for
synchronization and other network functions.

It's about reduction of trust. Running a full node and using it verify your
transactions is how you get personal assurance that everyone on the network
is following the rules. And if you don't do so yourself, the knowledge that
others are using full nodes and relying on them is valuable. Someone just
running 1000 nodes in a data center and not using them for anything does
not do anything for this, it's adding network capacity without use.

That doesn't mean that the full node count (or the reachable full node
count even) are meaningless numbers. They are an indication of how hard it
is (for various reasons) to run/use a full node, and thus provide feedback.
But they are not the goal, just an indicator.

-- 
Pieter