Re: How many nodes is enough?

Dash has 3259 paid nodes. Even subtracting that, it still has around 200 volunteer nodes, which is decent.

One could argue that those nodes technically aren't paid until they make 1001 DASH.

That would be incorrect becase you don't give up your 1000. If you run a masternode for a short time, get one reward, and shut it down, you have more coins than what you started with.

The people running a full node on BTC earn zero income from the node itself, no different from a node on, say, Quark. The fact that roughly 6000 people are doing it anyway (compared to 32 on QRK) says something about the strength and appeal of the coin.

I'm also pretty sure that it costs quite a bit more to run a Bitcoin node than most (all?) other coins. For example, when I was mining on p2pool a while back I had to upgrade my bandwidth allowance (at extra cost) just to keep the Bitcoin node going, and the bandwidth is higher now. No other coin that I can think of has that level of bandwidth requirement.

I wasn't saying anything bad about DASH btw. If you ignore the paid nodes and consider just the volunteer nodes (about 200) that puts DASH behind only BTC, LTC and DOGE, which is close to where it is in the market cap rankings (DASH is a bit higher than DOGE there). The only other two that are close to DASH in terms of volunteer node count are PPC (proof-of-stake) and NMC (anomaly as I mentioned).

"If you ignore the paid nodes and consider just the volunteer nodes"

It's kind of ridiculous to do so. A node is a node....pretending they aren't there is like pretending incentivized miners aren't there. I am guessing it might suit your purposes to do so, but in reality, Dash of course has the second strongest full node network, trying to spin it otherwise and say Dash only has in effect 200 nodes, is false.

what also matters, and hasn't been taken into account with those numbers, is the geographical distribution of the nodes. I.e., I'm sure X% of the DASH masternodes are hosted in data centers, as well as n% of litecoin and y% of bitcoin. Tomorrow the datacenter with 500 instances of dash masternodes decides, for whatever reason, that its not going to allow people to run the service. So those 500 nodes were in effect 1 node. Etc etc.

so, a node is NOT a node. A node in the same datacenter, and especially on the same *silicon*, is not another node. Each node is a point of failure. The closer the probability that set(n) of circumstances can destroy a set(x) of nodes means that set(x) of nodes are one point of failure, and thus one node.