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151 sats \ 4 replies \ @siggy47 7 Sep \ parent \ on: The Cost of a Bitcoin Node - Eric Voskuil bitcoin
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?
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
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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?
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The Bitcoin protocol, like democracy, is inherently reliant upon enough altruistic participants to remain viable.
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