Author: Santino Napolitano 2015-06-28 21:53:23
Published on: 2015-06-28T21:53:23+00:00
The debate around Bitcoin is not just about block size or hard-forks, it's about the nature of Bitcoin and how it will grow. The author intended organizations operating full network nodes would provide connectivity to light clients, who would make up the majority of the user base. This is consistent with current trends in Internet consumption, where tablets and phones are becoming more preferred than traditional computers.The incentive for running a full network node was to enable mining, which would provide rewards from new coins and transaction fees. If fees are ever to be a sufficient reward and still allow for a practical and useful system, the size of the blocks must grow significantly as must the user base. The global decentralized consensus appears meant to make the network resilient to a single government or other adversary's ability to shut the network down.The perception that SPV clients could be made nearly as secure as full nodes is one example of something that was wrong. Fraud proofs were believed to be practical but no design for fraud proofs which is both efficient and secure has been proposed, much less implemented and deployed. However, the security concern that a newly announced block may not actually reflect a valid block in an attempt to defraud the light client could be mitigated by the light client peering with a node it trusts or at least one which has no incentive to cooperate in some attack against it. If it's a more serious transaction, other nodes could be consulted.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:34:44.647448+00:00