Topic: Tipping a Bitcoin Node (Read 1718 times)

A project that I am following has decided to try one possible solution:


Lets see where this goes.

The first wallet that Satoshi designed was based around being able to send funds to an IP address, not just a public key.

Perhaps that might still be a useful feature for tipping bitcoin full nodes.

A scoring system to identify full nodes, including measuring its traffic flow.

Ping requests to establish if they are being shutdown at night.

Paying to an IP address, but hiding the public key; or the other way around.

You could periodically connect to a node and rate it based on the traffic you get from it and the propagation of transactions you send exclusively to it.

Given that method, we can check whether a node is indeed running full-time, but how can we give some incentives to the people who runs the node? How could we identify them?

Possibly a scoring system using several factors that make it difficult to be anything other than a full node.

One of the scores could be a random ping response every three or four hours to see if the client is turned off at night.

Id say it would only introduce incentives to attack nodes. What would stop someone from writing a very small and efficient tool that pretends to be a full node but actually refers any request to another or a set of other full nodes?

These relay nodes could possibly run on almost any device as they require next to no storage, little CPU/RAM and a reasonable connection. Once the majority of all nodes are ghosts they would cause grave issues as they are relaying requests among themselves

Another problem I see is that this idea would give an incentive to DDoS or isolate nodes from the network. This would introduce a new incentive for an eclipse attack[1].


[1] http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/eclipse/

How is that possible? Also, how to identify or see the stats of a certain node? Can you please elaborate further?

Nodes could be paid according to the number of transactions and blocks they propagate.

I'm thinking of the same thing, too. Full nodes need to receive incentives for helping the network. Their IP addresses are displayed whenever you connect to them, right? That is what I see whenever I check my wallet. The thing is, we aren't sure how to figure out who is running a full node and who isn't. I like the tipping idea, but identifying who needs to get some tip is kinda hard.

That is one of the more annoying problems I'm trying to figure out how to get around.

edit

It would be nice to have a tip that bounces back to someone else half the amount you would have gotten if your node is offline.

It has to be done in such a way that 'my grandmother' can participate without knowing she is helping the network.

I'm sure the mods would have a heart attack if thousands of people signed up and started posting just to get tipped.

I think there is a way to give out the incentives and keep people anonymous.  Just investigating some of the options (head scratching).

Just start a thread where people running a Bitcoin node can apply for a little tip.

how do you know if someone is really running always a full node, or he just shut it down from time to time?

Why can't work? How someone can abuse the 'tip'? Isn't it free bitcoin?



I hope the same thing, but at the moment the people seem that don't like this 'improvement'.

Full node can run p2pool for its miners to benefit from the operation, we just need p2pool to become more popular

there is no way to do this, this is why this tipping thing can't work, one could abuse it...

How would we go about proving to the world that a node is in fact a full node?

Agreed.

We need the nodes to tell us they are full nodes. That might require some changes a lot of people might not like.

The problem is identifying who really is a full node. You can set up thousands of "ghost nodes" that are just passthrough gateways for the same node but  will look like multiple different ones.
The moment you start with paid incentives, you have to try to fend off everyone that is trying to game the system.

Thanks. Much appreciated.

Overnight, my mind drifted to a popular UK government scheme called National Savings & Investments http://www.nsandi.com/.

Millions of people buy government bonds through small purchases. In return each bond serial number is entered into a random draw and a prize fund is distributed ranging from £10 - £1m to individual winners.

The more bonds you have the more chances you have of winning the jackpot.

The underlying economics of this model are:

* You don't lose your initial stake, you lend the money to the UK government.
* The UK government doesn't give you a guarantee you will get anything in return for your loan.
* The UK government enters your bonds serial numbers into a weekly draw (not sure of period) and most people get some form of payout over a 12 month period.
* The target winnings are, on average, at equivalent and competitive lending rates for the government - it pays out to winning bond holds a few percentage points per person on average over a year.


A variant of this and a lottery might have a slim chance of working for Bitcoin node holders. Their BTC address could be associated to their serial bond which is picked out at random on a weekly basis. Their bond number could be linked to their Bitnodes address / IP address, but held elsewhere to remove the link between the users IP and their Bitcoin address.

The extra effort to make this step would be desirable to make it easier for novices to host full nodes without having to change BTC addresses if they didn't know why they needed to do that when they first get started.

With an element of chance added, a full node might win the equivalent of a Block reward, or possibly smaller denominations which could be enough for people to consider their costs to own a full node as worth the bet.  Some weeks they might get enough to cover costs, some weeks they might make a small profit, some weeks they might hit the jackpot, but some weeks they might not get anything.

The problem is funding the incentives.

* You could tell people to loan money as a bond which will be sent off as loans to traders via exchanges, generating 0.45% interest charges per day (apparently this goes on at these high borrowing levels), and that could generate the rewards for the network.
* You could ask vendors to add a 0.001% full nodes tax to their sales to fund the incentives.

It's messy, but I might ponder on it a little more.