pull down to refresh
367 sats \ 6 replies \ @nullcount 7 Sep \ on: The Cost of a Bitcoin Node - Eric Voskuil bitcoin
Now show the price of storage in BTC terms! Running a node gets exponentially cheaper if you invested your BTC into your node instead of saving in fiat for node upgrades.
Lightning nodes, especially, can benefit from more expensive hardware like ECC RAM, RAID volumes, UPS, dual uplinks, etc.
The marginal new node is a net burden to the network. Unless it is actively listening for inbound connections and "seeding" blocks to peers, most nodes are just "leeching". To seed blocks, you need public IP and lots of bandwidth. Arguably, bandwidth is the "scarce commodity" which sets the floor price for a node. Many ISPs will throttle you after 1TB of usage in a single billing period.
The marginal new node is a net burden to the network. Unless it is actively listening for inbound connections and "seeding" blocks to peers, most nodes are just "leeching". To seed blocks, you need public IP and lots of bandwidth.
Can you expand on this further? Would this mean that the typical pleb, running an Umbrel or Start9, is probably doing more harm than good running a node?
reply
Its okay to be a "burden" that's what the infrastructure is for. A new node doing Initial Block Download (IBD) is definitely occupying network's resources.
The marginal user isn't "helping" the network very much because they're not able/willing to upload terrabytes of block data to other new peers doing IBD. It takes additional configuration to share blocks using bitcoin core.
Running node is a mostly selfish act -- it request blocks from peers so you can verify them for yourself, it hoards and indexes the blocks so you can do transaction lookups without relying on a third party.
Running a node with
listen=1 and a piblic IP bind address, uploading many TBs of blocks per month is a mostly altruistic act -- The most trusted altruistic nodes are listed in the seed_lists which bitcoin core nodes use to find their first peers on initial startupreply
reply
Great information. Thanks. I can't help noticing that there aren't many altruistic nodes on the list.
There are countless articles and videos directed towards the tech unsophisticated bitcoiner listing "help to secure the network" as a benefit to running your own node. I guess that's inaccurate?
reply
The Bitcoin protocol, like democracy, is inherently reliant upon enough altruistic participants to remain viable.
reply
I definitely think we need to be looking at costs other than storage. Bandwidth, processing, and RAM all seem to matter, especially with the larger UTXO set.
reply