Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bitcoind-in-background mode for SPV wallets

[Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>]

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 But we
>have
>to be realistic. Desktop tower machines that are always on are dying
>and
>will not be coming back. Not a single person I know uses them anymore,
>they
>have been wiped out in favour of laptops. This is why, given the tiny
>size
>of the bitcoin core development team, I do not think it makes sense to
>spend precious coding hours chasing this goal.

Your social group is weird.

Nearly every coworker at my previous job had a tower computer at work and at home. Equally in my nontechnical social group lots of people, a significant minority if not majority, have Apple and PC desktops hooked up to large monitors at home for media production and games. Those who don't more often than not have laptops used as desktops, sitting in one place 95% of the time and left on.

People have found it most efficient to work at a static desk for centuries - that's not going away. Of course we're seeing desktop usage and sales falling, but that's only because previously the mobile usage was forced into suboptimal options by technical realities. The trend will bottom out a long way from zero.

Besides, even if just 1% of bitcoin users had a machine they left on that could usefully contribute to the network it would still vastly outweigh the much smaller percentage who would run nodes on expensive hosted capacity out of the goodness of their hearts. If we educated users about the privacy advantages of full nodes and gave them software that automatically contributed back within defined limits we'd have tens of thousands more useful nodes in the exact same way that user friendly filesharing software has lead to millions of users contributing bandwidth to filesharing networks. Similarly take advantage of the fault tolerance inherent in what we're doing and ensure that our software can shrug off nodes with a few % of downtime - certainly possible.

Of course, this doesn't fit in the business plans of those who might want to run full nodes to data mine and deanonymize users for marketing, tax collection, and law enforcement - one of the few profitable things to do with a full node - but screw those people.
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