Quote from: ezview on March 19, 2016, 02:27:20 PM

This is a cool service. But will people need to use it? As soon as people start downloading wallets they act as nodes, so why would someone need to pay for a node.

Thanks for asking. The distinction is that when a new coin is released, there's no magic way for nodes to know about other peer nodes. The ways that each wallet bootstraps is often by one of the following methods:

1) Have other 'super' nodes hardcoded in the wallet source, so that it can connect to someone immediately,
2) In the OP, have each user add some lines to their config (e.g. mycoin.conf) like "addnode=N.N.N.N." to tell it where to connect,
3) Some IRC channel negotiation (not as common anymore)
4) Have a DNSseed server (e.g. dnsseed.mycoin.org) which caches all other nodes that start up and can pass along a list of nodes for the newly downloaded wallet to attempt connections with.

In all cases, you need some other reliable node(s) with good uptime and the most current blockchain so that each downloaded user wallet won't see the dreaded 'out of sync' errors indefinitely.

Also, most downloaded user wallets are behind firewalls and while they can connect out to the public nodes (which is what I'm offering), peers usually can't connect to them directly without opening the port required for the coin. So having a set of public nodes helps ensure that all users can connect and receive blocks quickly.