An economic node’s influence on the overall consensus of the Bitcoin network is proportional to the amount of economic activity involving that node/its owner.A node that is not being used for this purpose is completely irrelevant to the consensus rules of the Bitcoin network at large. It creates no economic pressure, imposes no opportunity cost, on the rest of the network when it alters its consensus rules. It is indistinguishable from a participant in a sybil attack.There might be other reasons to run a node besides verifying your own transactions, such as direct access to blockchain data for research or analysis purposes, but ultimately that node is irrelevant to consensus.This dynamic is why Bitcoin [consensus] cannot be sybil attacked. It’s why some malicious actor can spin up a million nodes on Amazon Web Services running different consensus rules, and it will have zero effect on the actual Bitcoin network.Your node doesn’t matter [to consensus], unless you use it [in an economic capacity]. So use it.
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105 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Jun
Not sure I 100% followed the logic. Is he trying to say that decentralized node-running is useless if economic activity is centralized? That's probably true... (?)
But I'm not really sure, because I'm not entirely convinced that Bitcoin's value is tied to the amount of economic activity it's being used for.
Bitcoin right now is seen as an attractive store of value because of its hard money characteristics. Even if big players like Coinbase create a fork, if that fork softens the hard money properties of Bitcoin, I don't think that fork would retain the same value. It has everything to do with Bitcoin's properties and not the amount of economic activity it's used for.
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47 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b OP 10 Jun
I think you're thinking past each other. He's talking about consensus and not value - although they are definitely related in some way.
The examples he lays out, although they're a bit hard to follow, make it clearer. If you run a fork of bitcoin, and other people are agnostic about the change, unwilling to run the fork independent of doing business with you, and they don't do business with you, then you running the fork has no impact on consensus. You running the fork does not, by itself, do anything to cause consensus to change. It does not do anything to cause other node runners to run the fork. It does not cause, or even suggest, that miners should run the fork. It does not cause, or even suggest, that big and small economic nodes (like exchanges) should run the fork. Your impact on consensus is invisible.
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84 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 10 Jun
If I show up to your store holding k00b credits in my wallet, and no one else has them, and I never exchange them or buy anything from you with them, or even ask you to accept them promising to buy something in the future with them, why would your store start accepting k00b credits?
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127 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 11 Jun
I will buy some off you. DM me.
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21 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Jun
I guess the part I don't understand is this:
Nodes don't technically contain any bitcoin nor are the responsible for any economic activity. They merely relay transaction and chainstate information. So I don't understand how a node can be "big" or "small".
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that your rules' influence on the network is proportional to your economic activity? (Replace the word node with the word rules)
And, in that sense, my argument was that a set of rules with worse properties is going to lose to a set of rules with better properties, even if the economic activity on worse rules was higher
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130 sats \ 0 replies \ @Wizardsardine 11 Jun
Whatever bitcoin node Cashapp uses to verify coins that are sent to it is a "big node" in the sense that has a lot of opportunities to reject coins that don't follow rules Cashapp thinks are bitcoin rules.
We all rely on a node (ours or someone else's) to make sure that coins we receive are following Bitcoin's rules. If you only receive a little bit of bitcoin every once in a while, your node is "small" in that not very much economic activity will be affected if you demand coins that follow a specific fork. If Cashapp only accepts coins that follow a specific fork, a lot of economic activity is affected.
Replacing node with rules doesn't quite describe what is happening. If someone keeps their coins at a custodian, they don't really have much say over consensus changes, even if they do have a lot of economic activity. Similarly, if a lot of people rely on a specific node (say Mempool.space's node) or a certain public electrum server, the rules those people care about may not have much relevance (unless they are willing to spin up their own node to make sure coins they receive follow such rules). I think it does make more sense to talk about nodes rather than rules here.
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51 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 10 Jun
Yes.
If you mean a set of rules can lose or gain value independent of economic activity, I see what you're saying. The good set of rules wins because, assuming rational actors, a greater volume of economic value will be transacted with those rules over time, correct?
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54 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Jun
Yes I'd agree with that
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @BallLightning 11 Jun
Is this related to people switching from bitcoin core to bitcoin knots?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Yachcf65 11 Jun outlawed
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibreHans 11 Jun
"Economic nodes" is an attack on node runners. Those retards want you to believe that during the blocksize wars, the transaction spammers mattered more than the node runners who started the uasf.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 10 Jun
This is an important message to hear.
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