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Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

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Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#141

Post by ibz »

baby wrote: post #121
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…

I mean to me the problem is how do you define a node? A node participating in consensus or any node? And if it's participating in consensus, is it counting only the nodes that participated in consensus since genesis or since some time in the past? All of these technologies are completely different.

The problem, if you go that route, is how you define participating in consensus.

Say I have a fully synced and always up to date Bitcoin node, running on a Pi in my closet, that I only use to make and receive payments, which I very rarely do. Then yes, that node did participate in consensus for those payments but it was practically asleep for all the other transactions happening in the network (it did validate all blocks, but it didn't have anything meaningful to say to the network).

I think a better metric is nodes that are economic actors, but that is hard to measure, since, like my example above, my node could be sitting in the closet and very rarely being used for actual transactions.

So maybe a even better metric then is potential economic actors? How many nodes that could, if needed, be practically used by people in carrying out actual useful transactions. But how do we measure that?

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#142

Post by nullc »

Not a good sign that it gets bitcoin wrong by a factor of 5-ish: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwa...

and then places at #2 because it erroneously just divides the ethereum stakable supply up by 32 and counts that as 'validators' when it's really just a small number of entities. That would be like claiming that bitcoin has some number of trillion 'validators' because it performs that many sha256 operations per unit time, or counting each 1e-8 btc as a 'validator' because anyone that owns bitcoin at all is incentivized to validate and protect the network or other such meaningless metric.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#143

Post by yieldcrv »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #140

i still don't really understand why BTC is worth 20k, and ETH 1.5k (today) aside from the idea that this is how much people are willing to pay. what was really the catalyst for this, my gut feeling is circa 2018 tether money printing and chinese money flight

ELI5: they are databases where writing costs a payment in that database’s token

people write to it

ELI16: they are public utility state machines that people pay to use, there are other metrics sites that show what people are willing to pay for. in many cases, the payments themselves make the token more scarce permanently, and anyone needing to make payments in the future has to buy it as a higher price from someone else. There is a lot of activity on the Ethereum network.

so despite the more familiarity with speculation, there are many users that acquire the cryptocurrencies as short term inventory when needed to perform state operations

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#144

Post by once_inc »

nope96 wrote: post #127
olalonde wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you are a bit understating your role here... jgarzik was one of the early Bitcoin core developers.

I think he burned his rep pumping "United Bitcoin", a strange Chinese scam coin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/garzik-forks-unitedbitc...

And his involvement in SegWit2X, which was dead in the water because of an off-by-one error by his hand. Had that code been run in production, the entire bitcoin ecosystem would have ground to a halt.

So yeah, bit of a burned reputation.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#145

Post by once_inc »

ibz wrote: post #141
baby wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean to me the problem is how do you define a node? A node participating in consensus or any node? And if it's participating in consensus, is it counting only the nodes that participated in consensus since genesis or since some time in the past? All of these technologies are completely different.

The problem, if you go that route, is how you define participating in consensus. Say I have a fully synced and always up to date Bitcoin node, running on a Pi in my closet, that I only use to make and receive payments, which I very rarely do. Then yes, that node did participate in consensus for those payments but it was practically asleep for all the other transactions happening in the network (it did validate all bl…

> it did validate all blocks, but it didn't have anything meaningful to say to the network

That is a bit of an understatement of its function. If a miner produced a bad block (with, say, 51 btc block subsidy), and it pushed that block onto the network to my node, it would reject it and not propagate that block to others. This is a meaningful feature that is often overlooked.

Looking at metrics like Realized Price and Illiquid Supply helps far more than looking at how many nodes are online.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#146

Post by once_inc »

jsemrau wrote: post #116
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

No post body was provided.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#147

Post by once_inc »

mbesto wrote: post #77
throw101010 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly I don't understand who you are "answering" to, the GP didn't talk about Market Cap as a relevant metric. Secondly, Market Cap is only relevant when reported by popular metrics websites which vet their data sources a little... nobody relevant is listing your coin anywhere, sorry if it disappoints you. Thirdly, I'm sure that in your first year as a veteran you will learn to care for coins/token which have liqui…

> Firstly I don't understand who you are "answering" to, the GP didn't talk about Market Cap as a relevant metric. No but they were clearly refuting the alternative suggestion (nodes) was game-able. That was my point. > Market Cap is only relevant when reported by popular metrics websites which vet their data sources a little > you will learn to care for coins/token which have liquidity/volume either on reputable CEX…

Not OP, but:

> by a centralized web site, is the exact antithesis of cryptocurrencies. What happened to decentralization?

A centralized cryptocurrency is an antithesis. I don't care if any of the products or websites in the surrounding ecosystem are centralized: all I care about is that bitcoin remains decentralized.

Decentralization is a force that limits usefullness. Bitcoin is useful only as a base layer; digital gold that higher layer (more centralized) systems can use to settle down to. Being more centralized offers features Bitcoin doesn't have (high throughput, easy onboarding, etc) at a cost of new risks (counterparty risk, etc). Settling down at the behest of the user allows those users to mitigate that risk, and get the best of both worlds.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#149

Post by ibz »

once_inc wrote: post #145
ibz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, if you go that route, is how you define participating in consensus. Say I have a fully synced and always up to date Bitcoin node, running on a Pi in my closet, that I only use to make and receive payments, which I very rarely do. Then yes, that node did participate in consensus for those payments but it was practically asleep for all the other transactions happening in the network (it did validate all bl…

> it did validate all blocks, but it didn't have anything meaningful to say to the network That is a bit of an understatement of its function. If a miner produced a bad block (with, say, 51 btc block subsidy), and it pushed that block onto the network to my node, it would reject it and not propagate that block to others. This is a meaningful feature that is often overlooked. Looking at metrics like Realized Price and…

Very good point, I didn't think about the propagation function of the nodes. Indeed, a node would only propagate blocks it accepts as valid.

But how does that help the network except by saving some bandwidth?

In the end, "bad" blocks will and should propagate and should be rejected by every node that decides that the block is "bad". There isn't one node that is a gatekeeper for "bad" blocks.

I think that whenever people talk about consensus, they think about it in terms of how a democracy works - and that is wrong, because Bitcoin is not democratic. It's not like if you nave n nodes, you need n/2+1 to agree on something and all the rest will be forced to agree to their decision. It's up to every individual node to enforce rules for their own transactions.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#150

Post by tromp »

latchkey wrote: post #104
cowtools wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thank you for clearing this up. However, I think you could have multiple competing cryptocurrencies in the ASIC class, because the ASICs are not as generic as GPUs or CPUs, so they cannot be easily repurposed for attack unless they are FPGA-based (doubful). Anyways, I'm looking forwards to the new supply of GPUs. Hopefully we don't get the same thing again with Chia hogging up all the storage on the mark…

Correct, asic's could have multiple, but in reality, don't. There is litecoin with scrypt. I was the 3rd largest scrypt miner there for a while. But these are all speculation coins without any solid utility. Nobody is going to build asics for coins that don't have demand. We saw this happen with Grin coin. Another little tidbit for you... GPU mining didn't really impact the supply as much as people like to talk it up…

> But these are all speculation coins without any solid utility. Nobody is going to build asics for coins that don't have demand. We saw this happen with Grin coin.

Not only is Grin the one coin, out of many thousands, that strongly deters speculation with its pure linear emission, but it did in fact have ASICs built for it (the Ipollo G1/G1-mini).

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