On 9 April 2014 12:27:13 GMT-04:00, Tamas Blummer <
tamas@bitsofproof.com> wrote:
>A border router that is not able to serve blocks is still protecting
>consensus rules, that SPVs do not.
>If the network would only consist of SPV nodes only then e.g. a
>majority coalition of miner could increase their reward at will.
>
>Archives need a different solution.
Any collective group that has a majority of hashing power will have no major issues running enough nodes that follow their rules to make SPV insecure anyway.
There's no good reason not to have SPV security nodes distribute block chain data, particularly block headers. It helps provide redundancy in the network topology and helps provide more resources for full nodes to sync up faster. For instance in a network with a large number of partial UTXO set nodes if those nodes are forwarding block data to each other they can get enough data to become fully fledged full nodes without putting all the load on the existing full nodes.
This is a good thing.