Quote from: aliashraf on November 26, 2020, 03:33:33 PM

OP has crafted the question thoughtfully:

S/he is not asking whether THERE IS any incentive but if THERE WILL BE such incentive ever. Obviously other than what @gmaxwell has mentioned almost correctly, securing one's own assets there IS no direct financial incentive for running a bitcoin full-node in the current state of the technology either for bitcoin or for any other POW coin. But this fact doesn't prove anything about the potentials of POW cryptocurrencies in general.

That said, one needs to remain focused on the main agenda of bitcoin and its clone: building/developing a decentralized p2p electronic cash, recognizing how critical it is to have the number of active full-nodes as high as possible to serve this sacred cause: decentralization.

So, I formulate the op's question as follows:
Is there any technical solution for a POW based coin to incentivize installing and maintaining active full-nodes preferably without disrupting the whole bitcoin technology?

As a matter of fact, investigating pooling pressure and mining centralization threats in bitcoin I've become convinced that an affirmative approach to the above question is inevitable in the framework of any solid solution to the core problem of mining centralization.

I actually started working on this a few years ago for a new alt-coin (yes yes, I know) called Poncoin <- Proof of Node. Even came up with a mascot Ponnie the Pinecone lol. Essentially each wallet would have a static (or dynamic) "PON address" that would be hashed with the ip + block to provide key: (ip address + pon address + relayed block = key) That hash would then be added to each relayed block. A certain amount of blocks later, let's say 120, as long as full node was still active, they could redeem a set value. To somewhat alleviate the issue of bad-actors running multiple nodes, a lottery would also be implemented to distribute reward.

There is ABSOLUTELY no reason there shouldn't be a reward for running a full node to answer the initial question, (just ask your local ISP if they think their bandwidth should be free) but I am not as smart as a hair on gmaxwell 's head, so I'm sure there are lots of flaws in my idea. Which is one of the many reasons Poncoin was never done.