On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> If the incentives for running a node don't weight up against the > cost/difficulty using a full node yourself for a majority of people in the > ecosystem, I would argue that there is a problem. As Bitcoin's fundamental > improvement over other systems is the lack of need for trust, I believe > that with increased adoption should also come an increased (in absolute > terms) incentive for people to use a full node. I'm seeing the opposite > trend, and that is worrying IMHO. Are you saying that unless the majority of people in the ecosystem decide to trust nothing but the genesis block hash (decide to run a full node) there is a problem? If so, then we do have a fundamental difference of opinion, but I've misunderstood how you think about trust/centralization/convenience tradeoffs in the past. I believe people in the Bitcoin ecosystem will choose different tradeoffs, and I believe that is OK-- people should be free to make those tradeoffs. And given that the majority of people in the ecosystem were deciding that using a centralized service or an SPV-level-security wallet was better even two or three years ago when blocks were tiny (I'd have to go back and dig up number-of-full-nodes and number-of-active-wallets at the big web-wallet providers, but I bet there were an order of magnitude more people using centralized services than running full nodes even back then), I firmly believe that block size has very little to do with the decision to run a full node or not. -- -- Gavin Andresen
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