On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 8:41 PM, Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:

On Tuesday, June 16, 2015 3:30:44 AM Kevin Greene wrote:
> Would SPV wallets have to pay to connect to the network too? From the
> user's perspective, it would be somewhat upsetting (and confusing) to see
> your balance slowly draining every time you open your wallet app. It would
> also tie up outputs every time you open up your wallet. You may go to pay
> for something in a coffee shop, only to find that you can't spend your
> bitcoin because the wallet had to create a transaction to pay to sync with
> the network.
>
> Also, users of centralized wallet services like Coinbase would not have to
> pay that fee; but users of native wallets like breadwallet would have no
> such option. This incentivizes users to use centralized wallets.
>
> So this is kind of imposing a worse user experience on users who want to
> use bitcoin the "right" way. That doesn't seem like a good thing to me :/

SPV isn't the "right" way either ;)

Hah, fair enough, there is no such thing as the "right" way to do anything. But I still think punishing users who use SPV wallets is a less-than-ideal way to incentive people to run full nodes. Right now SPV is the best way that exists for mobile phones to participate in the network in a decentralized way. This proposal makes the user experience for mobile wallets a little more confusing and annoying.

If you're running a full node (the real "right way"), you should be able to
earn more bitcoins than you pay out.

Luke