Author: Keagan McClelland 2020-05-07 04:07:09
Published on: 2020-05-07T04:07:09+00:00
The discussion revolves around the issue of externalizing the costs of security from light clients onto full nodes. It is suggested that having light clients choose their full node tethers explicitly could be a solution to this problem. This way, many light clients can work off of a family node and peer services could be limited to some sort of "authenticated" peers, reducing the costs that can be properly externalized without exposing risk of consensus capture by economically weighty institutions. However, there are concerns regarding the possibility of consensus capture by any subset of users whose interests diverge from the overall consensus. The more light clients outpace full nodes, the more the costs of security are being externalized from the light clients onto the full nodes, making them harder to run and causing a net new increase in light clients while redistributing the load onto a smaller surface area. This process is naturally unstable and as node counts drop, the set of node operators will increasingly represent economic actors with extreme weight. It is also mentioned that consensus capture by miners is not the only concern here and we should be wary of consensus capture by exchanges or HNWI's as well. It is emphasized that trust-minimization of Bitcoin security model has always relied first and above on running a full-node and all efforts to improve the "full node-less" experience are harmful and should be actively avoided.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:12:28.172109+00:00