Topic: How you will pay for Bitcoin network access services in the future - page 2. (Read 5286 times)

Yes.  Mike's efforts are valuable, such as recently getting Bitcoin extension in HTML5.

That's incorrect. He does it as 20% time, which is a google program where they let you devote 20% of your paid time to a project of your choosing, but approved by management. I have spoken to google employees among my friends and acquaintances and they say coming up with a good 20% time project is actually really difficult because finding one with the right balance of innovative, novel, and still valuable to google is quite hard. Your 20% project idea can be far out, like google's self-driving cars, but it still has to be something that google could plausibly profit from in the future.

For what it's worth, Pieter Wuille also works for Google as a Site Reliability Engineer, but unlike Mike he apparently does work on Bitcoin purely in his spare time.

I don't think Google pay Mike Hearn to work on Bitcoin, he moonlights on his own.

Excellent post! Unfortunately that everyone is sticking their heads in the sand about this.


This really makes you wonder why Google is so happy to pay Mike Hearn to work on Bitcoin.

When running a node becomes expensive enough that people can't do it for free you'll still be able to find full nodes willing to accept incoming connections. You'll pay for that service in a variety of ways:

1) Transaction fees: You connect directly to a miner who lets you do so because they want your transaction fees. They may require some # of transactions per unit time, and part of the agreement may be that you only send transactions to them. (easily verified) In return they'll run your bloom filter against incoming blocks, although don't be surprised if they force you to give them a bloom filter specific enough to identify exactly what addresses are in your wallet as part of the deal.

2) Pay-for-service: You pay for the service directly. In return they resend your transactions to miners to get them mined, possibly with preferential deals (kickbacks) that may or may not be public knowledge. They also run your bloom filter against the blockchain, and again, they may or may let you do so in a non-specific manner. Given AML regulations I wouldn't be surprised if the services that operate out in the open only allow you to tell them what addresses you are interested rather than a bloom filter obscuring that information. (AML rules apply to case #1 too)

3) Datamining: Google and other search engines already provide a lot of services purely in return for the data they can gather. The blockchain itself is a rich source of transaction data, made richer by figuring out the real identities behind the pseudonymous addresses on it. Just like #1 and #2 if you can determine who is sending what transactions and owns what addresses you can integrate that into a rich dataset to do things like get real-world information on what vendors are actually popular, which in turn can feed search engine results and other services.

It'll be interesting to see how AML regulations apply to all these services in the future. I suspect they'll eventually be subject to the same know-your-customer rules as any other financial service provider to help authorities link identities to Bitcoin addresses. This doesn't have to be very intrusive: in case #3 that might be as simple as using your Google login to authenticate with Google's Bitcoin servers.