Jameson,

I like your thinking about the implicit reward of full nodes. It was not perceived as sufficient by many, hence full node counts were falling.

This might reverse now as the implicit value of validating yourself however becomes higher in a heterogenous environment, that is if there are hard forks in the wild.

Actually pooled mining became an option through the homogenous nature of the network.

Tamas Blummer

On Aug 19, 2015, at 13:42, Jameson Lopp via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

The incentives for running a node may not be obvious to the average user, but they are there. Rather than direct monetary incentives, they are indirect. For one, it allows you to have a local copy of the blockchain that you validated yourself - trustlessness is the entire point of this system. Having local self-validated blockchain data is also essential for any enterprise that needs to quickly access large volumes of it. The other incentive is it supports the network. Users may feel that this is necessary out of altruism or they may feel incentivized to protect their investments in Bitcoin.

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