So with the Blackrock spot ETF looking like it will become a reality, I've been thinking about this.
Let's say that Blackrock wanted to impose a change to the consensus rules, they could use their money to spin up thousands of bitcoin nodes running their software/consensus rules and form a majority.
There are currently about 50k ish btc nodes (https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html) and that is nothing for a big player to top.
Assuming a crazy expensive cost of US$ 1000 per node, with like 55 million dollars they can have a majority of nodes. That is pocket money for someone like Blackrock.
With that in mind, shouldn't we be focused more on increasing the number of plebs running nodes instead of focusing on a "security budget" that may or may not become a problem several years from now?
Or am I just missing something?
2393 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullcount 7 Oct 2023
Running a node (or multiple) is how you verify that the Bitcoin you are interacting with is legit (according to the rules enforced by your node). Making multiple nodes does not magically force others to use your nodes to verify their own txns.
So if someone wants 50k nodes that enforce the wrong rules, they're free to create that fork and start using it themselves. Any "non consensus coins" they try to spend will be rejected by every node that is enforcing the "correct" rules.
Should we focus on getting more plebs to run a node? A pleb should run a node for their own benefit. How else can they be sure the sats they "own" are actually theirs? We should educate users of this fact for their own protection.
Do more plebs running nodes "help the network". Yes, it helps with decentralization but its not as simple as "more nodes the better". I.e. one node per pleb is fine. If every pleb ran 10 nodes instead, it wouldn't be any better than 1 node per pleb.
If you run a node, but never use it for anything, that node is almost useless. It can still help relay blocks, but in terms of its significance towards "validation and enforcement" its basically useless. Even if you run 10k nodes and never use them, its not very helpful for anyone.
There is a concept of "economic nodes". These are the nodes that back public block explorers, exchanges, wallets, and services that handle lots of BTC or are used by lots of people to "verify" lots of BTC.
These large economic nodes are the most important ones. Suppose the most popular block explorers and exchanges started using a forked node and stopped supporting BTC. This would cause a great disturbance as many people who use those economic nodes have trusted them with verifying "what is bitcoin". And when they say, "this fork is bitcoin" they are likely to fool lots of people.
Notice that the economic nodes don't need to run thousands of nodes to be successful in pushing the fork onto users. They just need to first gain the trust of thousands of users and prey on the fact that many of those users are not verifying separately with their own nodes.
An attacker with thousands of nodes could pull off an eclipse attack, whereby the attacker's nodes manage to become the only peers of a node. Thus, they can withhold relaying blocks to this peer and make them fall behind. Its really difficult to do since it only takes one honest peer to keep the chain updated.
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1092 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 7 Oct 2023
Do you understand the meaning of this meme?
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1598 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 7 Oct 2023
Nothing would directly happen. Potentially increased danger if those nodes were used maliciously, in targeted ways to commit eclipse attacks of different kinds. Privacy would be eroded and surveillance of transmissions, but you can probably assume that this is happening already.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @jgbtc 7 Oct 2023
If 50k bcash nodes exist, would that matter to Bitcoin? I think the bigger concern is that BR is able to convince a significant number of existing nodes to switch to their fork, by a massive propaganda campaign or something. A single entity spinning up tons of new nodes with different consensus rules is pointless because they will just be ignored by the rest.
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295 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 7 Oct 2023
Go to Google Cloud and spin up a million nodes, honeybadger don't care, we would fork, miners would choose which one they would want, if they all chose the right fork we go on, if theirs a split we have two forks, the rest of us dump that shitcoin and we move on
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl 7 Oct 2023
This
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48 sats \ 1 reply \ @quark 7 Oct 2023
If that attack happens, we would fork and keep going on. It's the community what matters, not the number of malicious nodes.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl 7 Oct 2023
+1
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @rijndael 8 Oct 2023
Nodes don’t vote.
If there is a contentious fork, what matters is which coins get bought and which coins get sold. Running a node means that you can be sure you’re receiving the coins you think you should be.
Running a node doesnt “defend the network”, it lets you validate the transactions you receive and the blocks theyre in.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @Stacktoshi42 7 Oct 2023
Node that are just spun up to make a change do not mean a thing.
They can keep going with there thousands of nodes in their own fork.
I think the NY agreement and block size wars or the mining ban in China have illustrated how resillient bitcoin is against big orchestrated attacks.
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22 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 7 Oct 2023
It's not the quantity of nodes that matters.
If BR changes the software/consensus rules, they would need to hardfork, kinda like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV and Litecoin.
Regular nodes (true bitcoiners) won't run their fork.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @JReeCoin 7 Oct 2023
To their disadvantage as miners in the longrun. 51% attack won't be feasible in practice, but even if it worked for them, rewards will significantly decline.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @nikotsla 7 Oct 2023
A lot of game theory there... every time you do something... it's a signal. What could happen if this actor do that, with the price, with the relevance of btc, with the reaction of node operators, devs, etc. It is not isolate.
What if NSA is the owner of 1M BTC (Satoshi) and in 10 year wake up... 1/21M ... lot of power, but again, it will not be an isolate signal without repercussion.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fred 8 Oct 2023
51% attack is still viable but bitcoiners wouldn't just sit around as the attack is coming
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 7 Oct 2023
deleted by author
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl 7 Oct 2023
We would hard fork.
Plebs would dump the forked coins for more REAL btc.
BlackRock would lose money.
Plebs would make money.
Tick Tock next block.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Stacktoshi42 7 Oct 2023
🍯 Badger don't care :D
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @netstatic 7 Oct 2023
Spinning up a lot of nodes with different consensus rules means nothing. They’d just be another Bitcoin fork since the average Bitcoin Core user (and wallet apps that use Bitcoin Core) would ignore blocks from the theoretical BlackRock nodes. They can try to spin up nodes with shitty policies too, but then you’d get into the scenario that orddisrespector did where they wouldn’t be able to stop the flow of data between honest nodes (which miners always have incentives run in order to maximize profit)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @adexmakai4211 7 Oct 2023
That's still not enough to pull down the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
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