Thanks ❤️

Nodes don’t get fees, only those contributing POW (miners). This is because nodes don’t have a cost and can be Sybil attacked. There’s no way to distinguish a “real” from a “fake” node. This is an important part of why node costs must remain low, because the only incentive to run one is self defense & it’s voluntary. If the cost is ever too high, fewer will run them and the security/decentralization of the network will be at risk.

As far as fees, they will continue to increase. They will likely get so high as to make anything less than $1,000-$10,000 settlements have disproportionately high fees. This is similar to Fedwire, our current settlement network that is centralized and permissioned. I think the median Tx size is like $5 mil or something.

Many people can only see disaster when this comes up but fail to see what this means for the network demand and the market that forms around this. The nature of the tools we have like Taproot and then the ability to various signature aggregation techniques (then add in new opcodes like CTV), means that this fee cost will be highly distributed among many parties and service providers. In other words, every UTXO will act as settlement for 100s or 1,000s of individual payments made on higher layers. And most people will interact with the base layer only when something goes terribly wrong, and in that case a $50-$100 fee to settle & exit with your entire financial wealth where no govt can contest it isn’t a high fee to pay at all.

I also increasingly think there will be a form of shared custody “insurance” like service for these sorts of things, whether it acts as a collective exit clause for large groups to batch in the case of emergency, or if it just ends up being a small on going service fee that aggregates a pool for on chain settlement, regardless I think these sorts of non-custodial or programmatic services will be commonplace as the base layer becomes the world’s open, stateless monetary settlement layer.