Nostr Web Client

Thought experiment:

How can we 10X the number of bitcoin nodes running in a distributed, trustless way?

Turnkey software solutions make it easy for people to set up a node but the hardware is often overpriced and overhyped, while the software provides a central point of capture (What do you do if your Raspbery Pi Node Software Provider goes rogue and auto-updates all their users to an evil fork?)

So I’m toying with the idea of mad market devices with the bitcoin software burned into the hardware in a write-once way. Nodes can’t be upgraded remotely since it’s basically an ASIC for a particular version of the consensus model.

But how can you trust the hardware to truly be write-once and/or not have a backdoor? How can you allow updates for auxiliary software like Tor and Electrum?

Thoughts?

Or is it just a solution in search of a problem?

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Discussion

ff8b6e10... 2y ago

*mass market devices

Basically the vision is that you have cheap all-in-one devices that you unbox and plug in and voila you’re running a node.

But this is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea if the user cannot independently prove that the desired software, and ONLY the desired software is (and forever will be) on the device.

Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

Baking Bitcoin core onto a device this way means no security updates.