Quote from: smooth on October 01, 2015, 03:26:51 AM

Quote from: blobafett2 on October 01, 2015, 03:06:55 AM

I think "Volunteer nodes" are part of the problem not the solution.

Respectfully I disagree. Nodes in and of themselves don't actually do much that is useful other than seeding blocks, and you really only need a few nodes to do that.

The reason I exclude paid nodes is not that one kind of node is better than the other, it is that I'm looking at volunteer nodes as an indicator of participation. If you pay people to do something, sure they'll do it, but it loses value as an indicator of anything other than the rate of payment, or at least it can't be viewed as an apples-to-apples comparison from one coin to another.

You make a valid point that the cost of running a node is function of the amount of activity on the network in terms of bandwidth, storage, etc. so maybe that should be considered as part of the indicator along with whether people run nodes or not. If I had to guess that would probably increase the scores of DOGE and BTC and decrease the others.

But size of the full node network is a bottleneck in the amount of transactions per second the currency can handle as full nodes process the transactions, Bitcoin it's only ~7 per second and hit capacity several times already with their fullnode network.

Adam back talked recently about how the number of nodes as a measure of security / decentralization:

If you boil it down going down from the requirements about what Bitcoin is and why decentralization and permissionless innovation [are important], you can translate that into what are the mechanisms that make bitcoin secure, and the full node auditors its not just running a full-node, you have to actually use it for transactions. Its the amount of economic interest that is relying on full-nodes and has direct trust and control of those full-nodes. This is what holds the system to a higher level.

...and how nodes are key in the blocksize debate: http://coinjournal.net/adam-back-on-the-overlooked-importance-of-full-nodes-in-bitcoin/

And there are groups trying to incentivize Bitcoin full nodes e.g. Bitnodes https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/incentive/ and http://www.coindesk.com/adopt-node-project-aims-bolster-bitcoin-network-security/

If we take Dash's working incentivized full-node network and transpose it to Bitcoin as a rough example, at 100x the market size, Bitcoin could have 300,000 servers for it's full node network instead of 5,000, or 30,000 at 10x the spec depending on how it was incentivized - wouldn't it be a different debate on block size in Bitcoin for example if that was the case?