~snip~
As someone who runs nodes, relays, bridges, and mailboxes for some projects, I think I can offer a personal perspective on the issue of rewards. For myself and several friends who share in these efforts, running a node transcends any monetary gain. It bestows a profound sense of expanding freedom and liberation in the world—a feeling so potent and invaluable, akin to love (which no amount of money can buy!). This is the essence of increasing total freedom: a united stand against the limitations enforced by governments globally. This feeling is priceless and motivates me to not only forego potential earnings but also to invest my own resources - I buy hardware and allocate both funds and time—all of which hold financial value—to support these projects. From my personal viewpoint, the 'reward problem' arises only when a project shifts from being a platform for the dissenting voices of the people, from a collective resistance to malevolence, to becoming a vehicle for wealth accumulation for 'HODLers' and institutions. After all, no one wants to labor for free while watching the 'rich get richer.' If it's no longer about a selfless collective standing against tyranny, injustice and state, it becomes a service—and services require compensation. Practically speaking, Bitcoin needs to consider implementing a financial reward mechanism for those operating non-mining nodes in the long term.
One cannot help but ponder why preemptive measures were not taken to mitigate the centralization of mining power, such as introducing deterrents to ASICs, similar to the RandomX algorithm?
Yeah, I agree with this.
Visa for example has a relatively similar amount of "nodes", and it makes sense for them to run them because they get paid through their fees.
In Bitcoin, the fees go completely to the miners.
In the whitepaper the idea was that the miner and the node where the same machine, so probably this issue wasn't really important back then. But now, miners are a completely different industry, and they are the ones making all the money.
Still there are dozens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes that are running securing the network, without getting any financial incentive.
It reminds me of landmark open source projects like SSH for example, which are used by millions of people but maintained by a handful of people for free in their spare time.
Open source is probably one of the best inventions in human kind, and yet it pays almost zero to the people developing it. Instead, useless and bloated software based on open source gets millions of dollars.