Author: Luv Khemani 2015-08-03 17:06:40
Published on: 2015-08-03T17:06:40+00:00
The block size debate has brought up the issue of the decreasing percentage of full nodes in Bitcoin. The burden on existing full nodes will increase with more people using SPVs, which will further reduce the number of full nodes. Full nodes bear the cost of validating/relaying/storing the blockchain and servicing SPV clients but gain nothing financially from it, yet they serve an important role in validating transactions and keeping miner dishonesty in check. Without independent full nodes, it would be possible for 3-4 of the biggest mining pools to collude and do whatever they wanted with the protocol. This is why many in the technical community are against drastic block size increases as this will worsen the problem of decentralization. Existing hardware is capable of validating/processing blocks much larger than the current limit, but the issue is one of incentive. Before the concept of lightning, there did not seem to be any trustless way of feasibly paying small micropayments to full nodes for their services. However, with payment channels and lightning, this may no longer be an issue. If implemented, fees are likely to be trivial and competition will drive down fees close to the cost of running a full node, increasing the number of full nodes and decentralizing the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:07:58.239651+00:00