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> I always thought that was a weak argument. There are currently 8403 nodes online if I believe https://bitnodes.21.co/ https://bitnodes.21.co/, that's not exac

• simias 9y ago
  That's exactly my point, yes. I often see people talking about the dangers of not having enough nodes but I think it's wildly overblown. In practice as long as you have at least a few thousand nodes run by a variety of uncooperating users around the globe it should be enough to handle all the transactions and raise an alarm if anybody attempts something foul. The amount of coordination required to carry an attack by taking over the node network seems rather implausible. For one thing you'd have to convince all the big exchanges and the miners to play along and then you'd have to hope that none of the people running the thousand of nodes would see the fork and raise the alarm publicly. It might however make it easier to run "transaction malleability" attacks however but that's an other issue altogether and ought to be fixed in the short term.