Author: ZmnSCPxj 2020-05-05 13:49:58
Published on: 2020-05-05T13:49:58+00:00
The security model of Bitcoin has always relied on running a full-node. However, the current paradigm may be shifted by Lightning Network (LN), where fast, affordable, confidential, censorship-resistant payment services may attract adoption without users running a full-node. According to some experts, this would compromise Bitcoin's security as it depends on the assumption that a supermajority of the economy verifies their incoming transactions using their own full node. The past few years have seen severe regressions in this area, and Bitcoin's future seems bleak without serious improvements to the full node ratio.Some experts oppose merging support for BIP 157 in Core since all efforts to improve the "full node-less" experience are harmful and should be avoided. BIP 157 improves privacy of fn-less usage while providing no real benefits to full node users compared to more efficient protocols like Stratum/Electrum.BIP 157 can be implemented as a separate daemon that processes the blocks downloaded by an attached `bitcoind`. The intention of putting BIP157 directly into bitcoind was to force all `bitcoind` users to possibly service BIP157 clients in the hope that any arbitrary fullnode can get BIP157 service. This is supposed to improve the situation relative to Electrum servers, where there are far fewer Electrum servers than full nodes.However, deploying BIP157 could lead to an effective DDoS on the full node network if a large number of BIP157 clients arise. It is suggested that watchtowers provide light-client services, which seems to be the major business model of watchtowers. This is still less than ideal but is better than nothing.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:17:18.236620+00:00