> I have heard such theory before, it's a complete mistake to think that others would run full nodes to protect their business and then yours,

It is a complete mistake to think that others would create a massive website to share huge volumes of information without any charges or even any advertising revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

Wikipedia, 5th largest website. Well, I guess there's some exceptions to the complete mistake, eh?

Relying on other nodes to provide verification for certain types of transactions is completely acceptable. If I'm paying a friend $100, or paying my landlord $500, that's almost certainly totally fine. There's nothing that says SPV nodes can't source verifications from multiple places to prevent one source from being compromised. There's also some proposed ideas for fraud proofs that could be added, though I'm not familiar with how they work. If verification was a highly in demand service, but full nodes were expensive, companies would spring up that offered to verify transactions for a miniscule fee per month. They couldn't profit from 100 customers, but they could profit from 10,000 customers, and their reputation and business would rely on trustworthy verification services.

I certainly wouldn't suggest any of those things for things like million dollar purchase, or a purchase where you don't know the seller and have no recourse if something goes wrong, or a purchase where failure to complete has life-altering consequences. Those transactions are the vast minority of transactions, but they need the additional security of full-node verification. Why is it unreasonable to ask them to pay for it, but not also ask other people who really don't need that security to pay for it? If a competing blockchain successfully offers both high security and low-fee users exactly what that particular user needs, they have a major advantage against one that only caters to one group or the other.

> Running a full node is trivial and not expensive for people who know how to do it, even with much bigger blocks,

This logic does not hold against the scale of the numbers. Worldwide 2015 transaction volume was 426 billion and is growing by almost 10% per year. In Bitcoin terms, that's 4.5 GB blocks, and approximately $30,000 in bandwidth a month just to run a pruning node. And there's almost no limit to the growth - 426 billion transactions is despite the fact that the majority of humans on earth are unbanked and did not add a single transaction to that number.

I don't believe the argument that Bitcoin can serve all humans on earth is any more valid than the argument that any computer hardware should be able to run a node. Low node operational costs mean a proportional penalty to Bitcoin's usability, adoption, and price. Low transaction fee costs mean a proportional high node operational cost, and therefore possibly represent node vulnerabilities or verification insecurities.

There's a balancing point in the middle somewhere that achieves the highest possible Bitcoin usability without putting the network at risk, and providing layers of security only for the transactions that truly need it and can justify the cost of such security.

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 3:33 PM, Aymeric Vitte <vitteaymeric@gmail.com> wrote:

I have heard such theory before, it's a complete mistake to think that others would run full nodes to protect their business and then yours, unless it is proven that they are decentralized and independent

Running a full node is trivial and not expensive for people who know how to do it, even with much bigger blocks, assuming that the full nodes are still decentralized and that they don't have to fight against big nodes who would attract the traffic first

I have posted many times here a small proposal, that exactly describes what is going on now, yes miners are nodes too... it's disturbing to see that despite of Tera bytes of BIPs, papers, etc the current situation is happening and that all the supposed decentralized system is biased by centralization

Do we know what majority controls the 6000 full nodes?
Le 29/03/2017 à 22:32, Jared Lee Richardson via bitcoin-dev a écrit :
> Perhaps you are fortunate to have a home computer that has more than a single 512GB SSD. Lots of consumer hardware has that little storage.

That's very poor logic, sorry. Restricted-space SSD's are not a cost-effective hardware option for running a node. Keeping blocksizes small has significant other costs for everyone. Comparing the cost of running a node under arbitrary conditons A, B, or C when there are far more efficient options than any of those is a very bad way to think about the costs of running a node. You basically have to ignore the significant consequences of keeping blocks small.

If node operational costs rose to the point where an entire wide swath of users that we do actually need for security purposes could not justify running a node, that's something important for consideration. For me, that translates to modern hardware that's relatively well aligned with the needs of running a node - perhaps budget hardware, but still modern - and above-average bandwidth caps.

You're free to disagree, but your example only makes sense to me if blocksize caps didn't have serious consequences. Even if those consequences are just the threat of a contentious fork by people who are mislead about the real consequences, that threat is still a consequence itself.

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 9:18 AM, David Vorick via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Perhaps you are fortunate to have a home computer that has more than a single 512GB SSD. Lots of consumer hardware has that little storage. Throw on top of it standard consumer usage, and you're often left with less than 200 GB of free space. Bitcoin consumes more than half of that, which feels very expensive, especially if it motivates you to buy another drive.

I have talked to several people who cite this as the primary reason that they are reluctant to join the full node club.

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