Quote from: GGUL on Today at 01:30:05 PM

This is not a constructive or engineering approach. Any system has optimal parameter values, or an optimal range. An unlimited increase in a parameter is usually never required, and often leads to unnecessary costs, and the effect of the increase is close to zero.

Therefore, it is more correct to set the goal in a different way: for Bitcoin to work reliably, the number of full nodes should not be less than a minimum level of N. Next, we need to find out the value of N, and ensure that the number of full nodes does not decrease below this level.

Now we have ~10 thousand full nodes. It may well turn out that this is already above the minimum level and further increase does not give any profit for the entire system.

You think that the number of full nodes should be increased. You could use the numbers to show what will improve in the system, and how much.

Hmm good point, marginal utility usually decreases. Unfortunately I don't have a computer science degree so I won't be an expert in that area. I would love to see what's the optimum amount.

But the crux is that if you're not running a full node, you can't validate the info that you received and that is thus not ideal. I don't think that there would be an optimum number of nodes to have, having more nodes on the network doesn't decrease the experience for everyone else but it'll improve redundancy. You can have 100 nodes for the network to work but the degree of redundancy would be low. Since they aren't compensated, there shouldn't be any cost borne by anyone else?