Nick Szabo  🔑

After researching the issue, chatting w @LukeDashjr and touching base w @pyskell, I support both Bitcoin & ETC efforts to reduce block sizes to align chain growth w long term average bandwidth growth so chain download times do not stretch excluding users from running full nodes.

Bandwidth growth is not very predictable, and demand for transactions (and thus for such bandwidth) far less still.

Bandwidth growth may not be *precisely* predictable, but there are reasonable expectations. Demand for transactions should not be a factor in such limits at all.

Luke, what do you think of Dash's system for remunerating full nodes? This debate is consequent of a glaring (but perhaps unsolvable) imperfection where miners and exchanges earn (at 2 different levels) transaction fees but full nodes don't. Dash claims to have solved this.

I haven't looked at Dash specifically, but it seems difficult. After all, it's not merely running full nodes that needs to happen, but using your own to verify payments to you. It's hard to prove this.

Having your own full node to verify payments received is incentive compatible *if* either you have frequent large payments incoming or you've already funded your node by other means (like Dash?), making the ability to .verify small or uncommon incoming payments icing on the cake.

That said, I don't know how (or if) Dash solves the problem of preventing Sybil attackers from claiming to run full nodes when they really aren't. #Bitcoin #Dash