This is a fake hypothetical world where it’s completely free to run a full node. Everything else in the world stays the same
Discussion
What's the point of the thought experiment if it takes place in an unrealistic world?
I’m wondering if there is a utility that could be implemented without losing any of the decentralization or security of Bitcoin, if people would desire those utilities.
What utility does it not have that it needs? I would argue Bitcoin Core has all the utility it ever needs.
Strictly talking about L1 Bitcoin, it takes 10 minutes to confirm a transaction and if you buy KYC, everywhere you send sats is recorded on chain. So we use L2 options like Lightning that give us the speed, but lack some of the decentralization.
If Bitcoin’s blocks were bigger (a terrible idea because of node storage) we could have lightning fast transactions that can scale to billions of people.
viva shitcoins.
The very basis, of it being free to run the nodes, completely voids everything else in the experiment. It is cheap to run them, but nonzero.
I've worked on projects that use ZKP. There is nothing free possible from them, they are incredibly expensive computation-wise. Bitcoin transactions can be as anonymous as CTs if you strictly use coinjoin frequently and tor for tx broadcast.
When the cost of running a node does get close enough to zero to be practically free, the people will let the block size double or quadruple. Right now, it's at least about $200 for the storage and the network cost is probably about $5/month and that will cover you for probably another 3 years.
Since the current price is close enough to about 3*12*5 for 3 years operation, or about $10/month amortised, we are not there yet. And that doesn't count the power, which is currently probably like $10/month... The vast majority of the people of the world are barely earning that much money in 3 months, how are they going to get the storage?
When it costs $1/month all totalled, to scale that down, we are talking about $36 total cost for 3 years of running a node, this includes the power, then you have a point. But obviously that is somewhere between 5 and 10 years in the future.
So, SHUTUP bigblocker.
I’m not a big blocker 😂 I’m asking if you would desire the utility of big blocks if the price of running a node was free. I understand why the blocksize should be small.
If the block size doesn't also raise the processing requirement above what is available at the price point then of course not.
If you don't know what I mean, go get a 10 year old computer and see how long it takes.
Spinning disks are already pretty much impractical because you will be waiting at least several weeks if not months for IBD. I found you can squeeze it with 100gb of SSD set up using a caching tool, but it still was almost a week to sync.
If you already have access to a fully synced node, copying its data directory to a spinning disk might be viable, but the amount of read/write required for the database, my intuition is that it's just not practical with a ~550Gb chain, it will still struggle to sync just new blocks as they come in.
Naw this is a perfect hypothetical world where it’s free and easy to have a full Bitcoin node. I’m really just seeing if everyone agrees that these "shitcoins" do have utility we would like, but they’re still shitcoins because they don’t have the decentralization of Bitcoin. But if they did, then a fast and private currency that governments cannot stop is exactly what I’d want.
If they don't have the decentralisation the core utility is missing. It's not cash if it's dependent on one or a small number of organisations. It's not cash if it can't be anonymous (bitcoin can be anonymous because of UTXO accounting).