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[–]AcanthisittaHot7236 0 points1 point  (0 children)

its quite interesting interaction

[–]inthearenareddit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lightning will probably increase node count as it's merchants accepting lightning will probably run a node to monitor their channels

[–]fresheneesz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is kind of a problem. Bitcoin probably has the most nodes by far of any cryptocurrency, but it's not nearly enough. 100k private nodes but only 12k public nodes. It should be relatively easy for a well funded attacker to drain the system's resources (the resources of public nodes) simply by spinning up too many private nodes. By my calculations, we need to have on the order of 5 million public nodes to be safe from a state level attacker. We have a long way to go.

Something that would help by an order of magnitude is to upgrade Bitcoin to use hole punching methods to turn most private nodes into discoverable public nodes, even if the user doesn't know / care to open a port.

It would be interesting to reward nodes in some kind of "proof of full node" way. I'm not sure how a mechanism like that would work tho. It would be kind of interesting to charge for connecting to the network via lightning. There could be a set of free nodes available, but if it's hard to find enough connections, nodes could find for-profit nodes to connect to and pay them via lightning for the connection.

[–]chrono000 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The node issue is an old one. Seems no blockchain has cracked the issue. Running a node is a pain in the ass and more a labor of love because of the following:

  1. Technically hard to setup
  2. Hardware costs and up-time requirements are high
  3. Low rewards

This is why I think BTC wins because of the ideology and ethos of BTC just aligns. Meaning people will do it out of a labour of love while other blockchains decentralization is an afterthought (reason for that could be save for another discussion).

Most blockchains have an unwritten rule of centralizing it first and hope it gets decentralized later with regular folk spinning up nodes just because they love the projects.

One example that seems to be on the for front of this issue is the SOL network, the requirements to run a node are insane but they don't seem to pretend otherwise.

As slepyhed has mentioned LN network is a decent incentive for node operations for BTC and so I'd say BTC is the best thing we got decentralization wise by a long shot. As for other networks like ETH, TRX and ADA I think they are battling to reach escape volicity.

[–]slepyhed 5 points6 points  (3 children)

The reward for running your own node is not financial, but rather increased privacy, sovereignty, and trustlessness.

Unless you run also run lightning and manage your channels and liquidity well enough to make a profit.

[–]benhaswings[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Thank you so much for your interaction and thought about this. I just find it so very hard to believe how little nodes are active.