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by tfha
3121 days ago
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I believe the original intention was that all nodes would be mining nodes, and that there would be tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. I believe in 2008 Satoshi did not understand the full implications of ASICs or economies of scale. (S)he probably didn't even realize that ASICs existed. Regardless of the whitepaper, in our modern cyberscape the only way to be certain that the original rules (21m coins, can only spend your own money, etc.) are followed is to be confident that a wide and deep pool of users are verifying them. That is strictly at odds with heavy on-chain scaling. |
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http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/
"At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node."
Satoshi was well aware of specialized hardware. If the majority of the planet were using bitcoin, it would not be necessary for every user to be a node. It would still be plenty "wide and deep" if businesses were running it. The security of SPV is actually quite good.
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/188/
"I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN."
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/287/
"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."