Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

chainparrot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 179 posts

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#111

Post by wavefunction »

mbesto wrote: post #35
jgarzik wrote: post #31

Answer (12 yr crypto dev & veteran): Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. Further, the "Sybil" factor - which one party controls many nodes - and other centralizing factors - e.g. 90% of nodes are on Big Cloud - also complic…

Answer (0 yr crypto dev & veteran): I start a new coin call $FOO. I release 1,000,000 coins. I sell one coin to a friend for $1,0000, and keep the remaining 999,999 coins for myself. The market cap is now $100M. > Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. You can game either one.

It doesn't work that way. Market cap depends on circulating coins/tokens. This is an opportunity for you to learn some more though, which is always good!

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#112

Post by cowtools »

landemva wrote: post #106
cowtools wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the nodes are independent, I don't think it really matters as much as the distribution of the hash-power. The non-mining nodes will not be able to resist a re-org by antagonistic miners.

Is this true for validating full nodes on a proof of work chain? >> The non-mining nodes will not be able to resist a re-org by antagonistic miners. A full node can pick whatever block it wants as the tip of the chain. Many nodes choosing the same would be a UASF. That would resist, by ignoring, the antagonistic miners.

It does not matter because any new node joining would only need to connect to a single node that doesn't do the USAF in order to be converted against the USAF. The default behavior is to resist the USAF unless otherwise programmed.

Additionally, different nodes could receive different blocks at different times, meaning they will decide to do a USAF at different block heights.

The idea that non-mining/staking nodes do anything for decentralization or network security is basically cope for cryptocurrencies in which it is difficult for regular users to actually participate in mining/staking.

"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." -Satoshi

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#113

Post by daniel-cussen »

So in fact market cap was the reason Satoshi Nakamura I divine ended up immolating in 2015, like Lycurgus of Sparta who founded Sparta said don't change the laws until I return, left and starved himself to death, and the laws never changed. Went very well for Sparta. Similar concept of unchanging laws of high integrity in the case of Bitcoin, it was about getting them right from the beginning. Same problem, bad for integrity for the founder to stick around because he can lead, the goal is for the system to be beyond appeal, airtight.

Like it worked out way too well by 2015 and too poorly at the beginning, he thought he would get traction right away (hence the second block taking like a week, this indicates it's the first thing he released) but it didn't. Overshot the difficulty. So he was stuck pre-mining until he again selflessly stopped mining, he could have mined more. And he was an all-around cryptographer, so very very paranoid (job requirement) very hidden, Bitcoin wasn't the only code he wrote I divine the only code he published, similar to the Truecrypt author, went by alias John Smith that guy, who is getting out of prison for murders based on his code, in like five years. That's one alternate universe of Satoshi.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#115

Post by nl »

latchkey wrote: post #68
ahtihn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A ton of the reported nodes are actually running on AWS So? That doesn't mean anything, Amazon doesn't control the nodes just because they are running on its infra.

Because, tomorrow, they could decide to make it against the ToS if they wanted to. Hetzner has already done this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728

So people move them?

Control of the software is the relevant thing here. If AWS started modifying the software to make it fraudulent that's a problem.

Until that is an issue the hosting provider is as relevant as the bandwidth provider. It's just dumb compute.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#116

Post by jsemrau »

jgarzik wrote: post #31

Answer (12 yr crypto dev & veteran): Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. Further, the "Sybil" factor - which one party controls many nodes - and other centralizing factors - e.g. 90% of nodes are on Big Cloud - also complic…

Also from a service provider / architecture view there is a huge concentration on AWS [1]. So while the nodes might appear large in numbers, if AWS goes down (which is not entirely unheard of), the nodes go down with it.

[1] https://app.finclout.io/t/O0kvaxm

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#118

Post by mjmj »

schlauerfox wrote: post #96
guilhas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chia sounds like the biggest lost opportunity ever. Why not use the drives for cloud storage? Destroying a lot of HDDs and SSDs for nothing

it doesn't destroy disks anymore than datacenter use destroys disks.

And in reality much much less than a Datacenter would. Once plot files are written they use a cache to look up their hashes. The utility of those files on the other hand are a whole different conversation.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#120

Post by latchkey »

nl wrote: post #115
latchkey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, tomorrow, they could decide to make it against the ToS if they wanted to. Hetzner has already done this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728

So people move them? Control of the software is the relevant thing here. If AWS started modifying the software to make it fraudulent that's a problem. Until that is an issue the hosting provider is as relevant as the bandwidth provider. It's just dumb compute.

Move them where? As we've seen more recently with the OFAC list blocking... once one big player starts to block, the rest follow suit pretty quickly.

Remember also that a lot of the large staking players are staking on AWS and also have other external factors which dictate where they can host (taxes, corporations, shareholders, etc).

Many of the large players are also tied to AWS deployment APIs... moving means rewriting those. Ever worked with terraform before? It isn't just some trivial thing to point at another provider.

Post reply on HN