Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-09-20 23:11:33
Published on: 2015-09-20T23:11:33+00:00
In a recent bitcoin-dev email thread, a number of developers discussed the idea of increasing the basic infrastructure nodes by a factor of 100 or 1000 in order to improve efficiency and increase decentralization. The current protocol design pays around 3,600 bitcoins a day in inflationary subsidies, very little of which goes to the majority of critical infrastructure nodes and their operators. Incentives are not currently aligned properly, and this could be a problem with the current protocol design. However, having more core infrastructure nodes doesn't necessarily need to raise costs per transaction. It will most likely require abandoning the current approach of having three basic node classes: miners (which tend towards centralized pools), full nodes (which must validate each of everyone's transaction and in return get paid nothing), and thin clients (which essentially amount to parasitic nodes that do not contribute any resources back to the network and must be subsidized).
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:35:47.432241+00:00