Author: Eric Voskuil 2015-08-03 17:29:43
Published on: 2015-08-03T17:29:43+00:00
The Bitcoin community is facing an issue of decentralization as the number of full nodes reduces, leading to a "tragedy of the commons" problem. While full nodes bear the cost of validating, relaying, and storing the blockchain, they gain nothing financially from it. However, they play an important role in validating transactions and keeping miner dishonesty in check. The technical community is against drastic block size increases as it would worsen the problem of decentralization. Existing hardware is capable of validating/processing blocks larger than the current limit, but the core issue is that 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. With payment channels and lightning, a node could advertise its rates to SPV nodes upon connection, and the SPV could either agree or look for another node with lower fees. If implemented, competition would drive down fees close to the cost of running a full node, spurring an increase in the number of full nodes and increasing decentralization of the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:08:32.067310+00:00