Author: Eric Voskuil 2015-11-05 23:33:26
Published on: 2015-11-05T23:33:26+00:00
In a message to the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, Adam Back discussed the importance of economically dependent full nodes in Bitcoin's security model. These nodes enforce consensus rules and ensure security by preventing maliciously crafted blocks with high validation costs from eroding security by knocking reasonable spec full nodes off the network on CPU or bandwidth grounds. Back also noted the tradeoff between weak miner decentralization and good validator decentralization, stating that both being weak is risky. Currently, given the weakness of mining centralization, validator decentralization is a critical remaining defense. The proliferation of non-validating wallet software, centralized web wallets, and centralized Bitcoin APIs has weakened this side of the security model, which Back believes is underappreciated or poorly understood. Developers tend to settle on a couple of API providers for a given problem, leading to all applications and users relying on a single validator. If most Bitcoin applications were built on the equivalent of Bing and Google, this could lead to further weakening of the system's security model.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T00:54:01.248423+00:00