On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 8:00 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

The right way to start with this, if anyone cares, is to add instrumentation to existing SPV wallet apps to report back to home base how long they are running for, how much disk space / RAM they have, and possibly what kind of hardware.

I strongly suspect that the vast majority of SPV wallets are not left running permanently, and run on laptops where battery life is at a premium. These people will never want to run full nodes.

Bitcoins stands or falls with people running full nodes.

If no one wants to volunteer resources to support the network anymore, we'll have failed.

Sorry. I don't think it will ever make sense to run full nodes on consumer hardware again. Our time is much better spent on optimising so it's cheaper for full node operators to run them on cheap virtualised servers.

Most consumer hardware is much more powerful than 'cheap virtualized servers'. More memory, disks are cheap, and at least in the Netherlands home bandwidth is much cheaper than server bandwidth.

Also: any optimization that helps running on cheap servers will also help running it on consumer hardware. It's not the one or the other.

Wladimir