An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks
&gt;&gt;I do mention in the paper that the assumptions are up for debate, but I did try pretty hard to justify those assumptions so they are certainly not arbitrary.<p>Where in the paper did you justify those assumptions? I see them as not only totally arbitrary, but wrong according to any common sense analysis of threats or weighing of priorities.<p>&gt;&gt;If by &quot;biased&quot; you mean that I decided what results I wanted to get, and then chose the assumptions based on that, I really would love a bit more benefit of the doubt.<p>I will be happy to give you a benefit of the doubt if you can convince  me that the assumptions make any sense at all from the perspective of someone who wants to see people financially empowered by cryptocurrency.<p>&gt;&gt;You don&#x27;t know me, so its a bit strange for you to start accusing me of cooking the books on something I spend literally dozens if not hundreds of hours on.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s strange when you rest a behometh of an analysis on assumptions as unjustified as Bitcoin needing to limit scalability so that 90% of the world population, the vast majority of whom live in the developing world and can&#x27;t afford to use Bitcoin today due to lack of scalability, can run a full node.<p>If one thinks adversarially, then one has to assume potential malicious intentions behind writings intended to justify limiting the scalability of the most well-known and highest market cap cryptocurrency.<p>&gt;&gt;However at the same time, we don&#x27;t want the rugged pulled out from under us: we don&#x27;t want bitcoin&#x27;s rules to be changed out from under us. Enough full nodes need to be out there to ensure that various attacks aren&#x27;t possible on the network and that blocks that propagate are valid blocks. I think there is some sweet spot on both of those amounts. And I do think more discussion is needed around the assumptions we&#x27;re making. I wrote this paper in part to start exactly such a discussion about the assumptions and what concrete targets we have for bitcoin in terms of these network demographics.<p>Again: a trivial analysis shows that your logic is totally unsound. The population for whom you want to keep Bitcoin&#x27;s node operation costs limited is also the population that cannot afford to use Bitcoin directly and thus has no incentive to run a full node.<p>It makes absolutely no sense to massively inhibit Bitcoin&#x27;s utility, in order to make running a Bitcoin node possible for a population who this inhibiting action prevents from using Bitcoin.<p>In a scenario where 80 million people, or the richest 1% of the world population, is both using Bitcoin regularly, and can afford to run a Bitcoin full node on dedicated hardware, is both possible, and entirely sufficient to prevent the rules of the network from being changed.<p>I challenge you to describe a situation where Bitcoin throughput is 1000X greater than is now, the Bitcoin economy is 200X larger than it is now, there are tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people worldwide running full nodes, and yet the rules of the network can be changed without a massive outcry &#x2F; pushback from the ordinary Bitcoin user. It&#x27;s totally implausible, and I cannot imagine any reasonable basis for you holding this assumption.<p>&gt;&gt;Again, not arbitrary. The reason I did that is to include normal people. Normal people aren&#x27;t going to buy and set up a dedicated server for bitcoin.<p>Almost any one who runs a full node is a committed individual, not a normal one. And a committed individual could very plausibly buy dedicated hardware, and allocate 100% of it to running a full node. The assumption that normal people need to be able to run a full node without buying hardware is not justified, as such people are very unlikely to run a full node anyway.<p>To summarize: normal non-committed people running Bitcoin nodes is in no way needed to maintain Bitcoin&#x27;s resistance to attacks state-level actors, or prevent the rules from being changed without resistance from the userbase. This cohort is already a non-factor, and the more committed cohort running full nodes is entirely sufficient to maintain the network&#x27;s decentralization and censorship resistance.<p>&gt;&gt;Well, yes, they could afford to. That isn&#x27;t the question I&#x27;m concerned with. Its not about cost. Its about convenience. Will 10s of millions of people buy extra hardware just to run bitcoin? I would argue no, they won&#x27;t.<p>It&#x27;s not very inconvenient to buy and plug in a dedicated machine for running a full node. And if there are 80 million people worldwide who can afford to that, and practically everyone in the world is using Bitcoin every day, then yes, a significant minority of those 80 million people will go through the trouble of doing that.<p>If even 0.5% of that 80 million do, that&#x27;s 400,000 nodes. And if some state, or collection of states, begins to organize to try to attack the network, more amongst those 80 million will be motivated to run a node if they live in a jurisdiction that allows it.<p>&gt;&gt;But yes, you&#x27;re probably right that 10s of millions of people running PUBLIC full nodes is probably enough. My understanding is that we&#x27;re at less than 1&#x2F;1000th of that goal at the moment.<p>I didn&#x27;t say 10s of millions of people running public full nodes is enough. I said 10s of millions of people BEING ABLE TO run one is enough.<p>Driving for 10s of millions of full nodes, by limiting network throughput to the point where only 0.1% of the world population can transact on it daily, makes absolutely no sense. That would never work.<p>Furthermore, it makes no sense why Bitcoin would need 10s of millions of full nodes. It&#x27;s an arbitrary assumption, that is not supported by any detailed threat analysis or any evidence of real-world attacks that necessitate that size of a network for that matter.<p>&gt;&gt;Putting the majority of economic activity in SPV nodes would leave the system quite vulnerable in situations where a majority of hashpower hardforks to something dangerous or malicious.<p>SPV node operators would be made aware of this attack, and not rely on SPV data servers that recognize the invalid chain. Such an attack would be extremely conspicious, and there would be a strong social reaction to it resulting in any SPV data servers that are cooperating in the attack being completely discredited in favor of ones that serve accurate data.<p>Right now, the vast majority of the world population cannot use Bitcoin, and you&#x27;re trying to justify the extreme restrictions on throughput that cause this, on the basis of a highly unlikely threat where a majority of the world population have their Bitcoin activity coopted by a centralized authority through a coordinated attack by the majority of hashpower and SPV data servers, in which case the majority of the world population would be no worse off than they are now, where they rely on an entirely centralized financial system, because they cannot use Bitcoin.<p>&gt;&gt;I&#x27;m curious what your analysis would be of that.<p>Only what I already stated: the best defense against a political attack is allowing Bitcoin to scale by 100 or 1,000 times in throughput, to increase the proportion of the population that is economically dependent on the network, and would oppose attempts to politically attack it.