Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-12-05 02:54:52
Published on: 2012-12-05T02:54:52+00:00
In an email discussion, Alan Reiner and Greg Maxwell express differing opinions on the risk of centralization through promoting a SPV node to new users. Alan argues that there is no real risk, as long as all full nodes are full-validation, and that connectedness is the real metric of concern rather than the number of nodes. Greg disagrees, stating that there are DOS attack risks from sybil attackers and that a healthy darknet of private authenticated peerings between miners and other likely targets can address those risks. Regarding user experience, Alan believes that users will choose a lite-node or nothing at all if they have to wait for a full node to synchronize or run into issues like blkindex.dat corruption. However, Greg points out that current software patches plus parallelism can sync a fast system with network access in under an hour, and that promoting less capable and secure software to users does not align with the goal of making all the software painless for users. Overall, the email discussion centers around the trade-off between promoting a faster, easier user experience through SPV nodes and maintaining a secure, decentralized network through full-validation nodes. While both sides acknowledge the importance of user experience, they differ on how to balance it with network security.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T16:20:36.556875+00:00