Author: Jameson Lopp 2015-08-07 18:05:29
Published on: 2015-08-07T18:05:29+00:00
There are two primary reasons why people do not run a node in the Bitcoin ecosystem. For enthusiasts who want to altruistically run a node at home, it's usually a bandwidth / quality of service problem. The issue has been open for years, and developers could make it easier for enthusiasts to run nodes by providing a simple configuration option in bitcoind and a slider / selector in the QT client to throttle the total bandwidth usage.For businesses, it's an issue with the lack of indexing options offered by bitcoind. Thus the business will also need to run their own indexing solution, an out-of-the-box solution such as Insight or Toshi might work, but for more custom indexing, one needs to roll their own software. Depending upon the query volume / latency needs of the business, it may not make sense to bother administering bitcoind instances, the indexing software, and its databases - using a third party API will probably be more efficient.Pieter Wuille argues that if the incentives for running a node don't weigh up against the cost/difficulty using a full node yourself for a majority of people in the ecosystem, there is a problem. As Bitcoin's fundamental improvement over other systems is the lack of need for trust, he believes that with increased adoption should also come an increased incentive for people to use a full node. Gavin Andresen disagrees with Wuille and believes that people in the Bitcoin ecosystem will choose different tradeoffs, and people should be free to make those tradeoffs. Furthermore, he firmly believes that block size has very little to do with the decision to run a full node or not.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:21:33.175269+00:00