Author: Aymeric Vitte 2017-05-04 13:37:43
Published on: 2017-05-04T13:37:43+00:00
The idea of incentivizing people to run full nodes is being discussed in the bitcoin-dev mailing list. The discussion includes the possibility of miners/pools paying non-mining full nodes by outsourcing transaction selection using a different Proof of Work (PoW) to buy proof-of-uncensored-selection and proof-of-goodwill for a small fee. The proposal suggests that full nodes would generate and broadcast a template block which does not contain a valid header yet, contains the transaction selection, a coinbase output with a predetermined part of the block reward to themselves, and a nonce for PoW of a predetermined currently ASIC resistant hash function behind an OP_RETURN. The template with the highest PoW since the last block would be leading, and a miner/pool can choose to use this instead of their own, adding the rest of the reward and the SHA nonce themselves, setting up a competition among full nodes. Another suggestion was to have full nodes advertise a Bitcoin address, allowing users that need to download the blockchain from that node to be encouraged to send a tip to the peers that served them based on the percentage served. A recommended tip of 10mbit was suggested. Full nodes could also require a tip to download the blockchain, and if they do, users who don't specify a tip cannot use them. While this may represent a barrier to hosting one's own full node, it could also serve as an incentive for quality, long-term hosting. This proposal could cause stable nodes to stick around longer and discourage "installation spam" attacks on the network. Fees for other node operations can be considered if this is successful. However, some concerns were raised about adding a cost to the blockchain, potentially leading to centralization.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T00:36:23.573362+00:00