New answers tagged economic-theory
1
Though not the answer, I’d like to put some light on whether nodes should or should not be rewarded for validation:
using a light node wallet puts the wallet itself at (limited) risk rather than the whole network. For example even if all full nodes are malicious, users can resort to running their own full-nodes (there are less likely fork scenarios though). ...
0
TL;DR I believe it is possible if bitcoin were to change to a different consensus mechanism. (A hard fork.)
Currently in the bitcoin network only miners get paid, and nodes are operated by volunteers (in the sense that they don't get the rewards miners do).
For a truly decentralized system all block rewards should be aligned in such a way, that nodes of all ...
2
I think you've got your reasoning backwards. The reason we want more people to run nodes is because people only run nodes if they get value out of it, so more people running nodes means more people getting value.
If you incentivized people to run nodes, then they would be running nodes even if they produced no value at all. Of what possible benefit would ...
19
I don't think it is possible. There are a few problems to incentivizing the operation of nodes.
When you pay people to run nodes, people running multiple nodes provide less value but earn more for the same effort. In the worst case, you may be paying botnets to run nodes on other people's hardware.
It's hard to prove that you're actually validating, because ...
2
Can bitcoin protocol be changed to add economic incentives to validating nodes?
I think that would have to be a hard fork, a different currency.
Maybe the validating nodes can somehow prove that they have verified the blocks
Validation is not a service. No full nodes care whether other nodes do any validating. It isn't something anyone should pay for ...
1
However, as we know that things are driven more by market economics rather than philanthropic or feel good factors.
Running a bitcoin node is more than just helping the network. One recent tweet summarizes it in the best way possible, running a node is nothing but downloading the bitcoin implementation software, install and run like lot of other software:
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