Author: Peter Todd 2013-08-19 01:34:37
Published on: 2013-08-19T01:34:37+00:00
In an email exchange from August 2013, Gavin Andresen argued that Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) peers are incredibly important to the growth of Bitcoin and should not be heavily deprioritized. He stated that Bitcoin would be just fine if there were never more than 10,000 big, beefy, full nodes forming the backbone of the network, but would be nothing if tens of millions of lightweight SPV devices were not supported. Andresen preferred the more decentralized, less-trust-required SPV model over the Electrum model where tens of millions of lightweight devices rely 100% on a full node to operate. However, he also noted that serving SPV nodes should not come at the expense of maintaining consensus, mainly distributing new blocks around the network so the blockchain keeps moving forward. Andresen suggested basic measures to limit abuse, such as "sign up with your bitcointalk" account or "pay 10 cents for an account to discourage spammers". Overall, Andresen stressed the importance of supporting SPV peers while ensuring the network maintains consensus and security.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T16:10:20.173495+00:00