In regards to the scaling debate, transactions per second etc. I’m curious, and I don’t often see this mentioned. But why not add more nodes to the network to alleviate some of the load?
I’m pretty certain there’s a good reasons why not, but would actually like to know?
The number of nodes in the P2P network is unrelated to scalability. Due to the entire validating network operating in lock step, they all do identical work independent of their peers no matter how many of them exist in the system. One node, a thousand nodes, a million nodes all operate at the same effective speed (and the limits of the network are the same). Adding more peers actually worsens the load somewhat, as you increase the total bandwidth necessary to get the transactional data to everybody in the network quickly.
the number of transactions capable of processing depends on an agreement among the community to not make blocks larger than 1mb.
nodes validate and relay transactions, but they dont register them into the blockchain.
as such, adding more nodes might lower the latency when distributing transactions, but it does not increase capacity to process transactions on the blockchain.
