Topic: Is it worth having a board for operators of full nodes? (Read 647 times)

I guess I was hoping that it would become a board that isn't infested with thousand reply sig spamming threads. But there is probably no reason to assume that they wouldn't creep in.

This topic has become topical again, so I'm using it as part of my seo test , Key search phrase is  " ThermoCoin is going to be hot ".

What would be the point of it? What would be discussed there that is too privileged for everyone else to see and participate in? I see it as just a "I want some kind of acknowledgement that I'm contributing in some way" idea but won't actually serve any useful purpose. After the initial acknowledgement it would be a dead board.

The problem is that someone would probably set up a service for faking running a full node. They'd run one on AWS and just change the IP address every time someone wants to register. Even if I periodically checked that their full node was still running, someone could run one node with many IPs pointing to that one node, and sell cheap subscriptions for one of these IPs.

There's no way to verify that someone is definitely running a full node. This is partly the reason why Bitcoin doesn't reward people for running full nodes. (The other part is that simply running a full node doesn't matter very much; what we want to optimize is the number of people doing real transactions via their own independent full nodes, which is even more difficult to measure.)

theymos believes that Bitcoin users should be running full nodes from home. This is one reason why he has taken such a strong handed stance against discussion about the block size increase proposals because increasing the maximum allowed block size will make running a full node from home more expensive (in addition to the "forced consensus" that some proposals have stated they would use to fork Bitcoin).   

theymos has access to everyone's IP address when they access the forum, therefore he already knows which full node running from home is belonging to you

@Jet Cash -- there is no such thing as "proof of full node" in the Bitcoin protocol as Bitcoin uses Proof of Work to find blocks. It is also not very difficult to make it appear to others that you are running a full node when in fact you are not -- this is even in the default settings of Bitcoin Core via only keeping 300 MB worth of blockchain data. One might even be able to use the API of a block explorer to serve theymos "proof" of running a full node.

It might be beneficial to have a board dedicated to the discussion regarding running a full node (both a Bitcoin full node, altcoin full nodes, and fake full nodes), including things like security best practices around full nodes. However a lot of this can already be discussed in the technical related boards. 

Thanks for that post Lauda - I guess I started this thread as a sort of rant about the confusion between Bitcoin and blockchains. I guess such a forum would do nothing to help that. The other reason followed a post about monetising the operation of a full node, and there seem to be very few ways to do this. I guess I hoped that this sort of thing could be discussed on such a board, but on reflection, one would probably get a broader set of responses on the tech board.

re: the privacy matter -  surely one could discover this by looking at the IP in most cases.

1) It's not trivial to prove this (+ it's not trivial to give users permissions constantly).
2) Questionable usefulness. #Others can expand on this.
3) Privacy problem -> Theymos (or whoever is doing approvals) would know which node is mine.

The board could be viewable by all, but you would need to prove that you ran a full node to start and reply to threads on the board.
It might offer an encouragement to some members to host full nodes. It could also be useful for discussions about running full nodes with a reduced incidence of sig spamming in the threads.