Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

Summary:

In this context, the importance of full nodes in arbitrating consensus is discussed, with the realization that node users have little power to arbitrate consensus. Miners are often thought of as identical to nodes, but nodes cannot produce blocks and their opinions are not represented in the blockchain. The cost associated with running a node is also analyzed, with bandwidth costs being the most significant for full listening nodes. Home users with bandwidth caps may find it challenging to run a full node, and disk space may be cheap in bulk, but home users may view the cost as closer to $200 than to $2.The impact of running Bitcoin in the background on affordable, non-dedicated home-hardware should be a top consideration since full nodes are essential to prevent political hijacking of the Bitcoin protocol. Running a full node is the only way to ensure that changes you oppose are not introduced into the network. Despite the abundance of cheap RAM, 1GB is the limit for most people before they can no longer have all their programs open, leading them to choose not to run nodes. CPU usage and electricity are minimal concerns. However, if transaction fees reach the $50 range, there will be no use case for people unwilling to buy extra hardware for Bitcoin. Emergency funds incur fewer transactions per year, and the cost of fees on a home node may be $150/year, while dedicated hardware may cost $150/year ($600 box amortized over 4 years). The target is still to hit home nodes despite being two orders of magnitude away from fee pressure. To reduce bandwidth and disk pressure, periodically committing the entire UTXO set to a special checkpoint block that becomes the new de facto Genesis block could be a solution. Overall, the cost of running a Bitcoin node from home has a different financial calculation compared to data centers, and it is important to take into account the potential challenges and benefits of doing so.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:49:52.668947+00:00