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It was never the intention that regular people would run nodes. Satoshi envisioned that eventually nodes would run in large datacenters: https://bitcointalk.org
by johnyzee 6y ago
It was never the intention that regular people would run nodes. Satoshi envisioned that eventually nodes would run in large datacenters: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306
"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."
6TB is absolutely nothing in terms of storage. That is close to a single consumer device today, notwithstanding that storage is dropping in price constantly. For datacenters you could increase this by orders of magnitude and nobody would bat an eyelid.
- rspeele 6y agoBut why? Sure, it doesn't cost that much to store terabytes in a data center (plus bandwidth to distribute the chain to other peers, validate new blocks etc). But any cost is something, considering there is no reward for running a node. AWS S3 standard charges $138/mo to store 6 TB of data. Who gets $138/mo of value out of running their own full node, rather than just piggybacking off the existing network? As I mentioned in my first post, exchanges are the only ones I can think of.
- johnyzee 6y agoThere are a couple of cases where people like the added security of having their own node, such as exchanges as you mentioned, or big payment processors and the like. Other than that, I don't think there's any reason to run one for most people.
- tromp 6y agoSatoshi was using "node" in the sense of mining node, as is clear from "The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate." So he imagined mining to move to large datacenters, and users running non-mining nodes.