I'm setting up a pruned full node (not mining) on a small always-on machine, for the standard reasons: sovereign verification of my own transactions, contributing to network decentralization, not depending on a remote node.
Reading the tail emission documentation, the stated purpose is explicit: pay miners forever because mining is the costly, hard-to-fake resource that secures block production — without payment, hashrate (and thus security) would drop. That reasoning is clear and makes sense to me.
What I can't find anywhere — official docs, Moneropedia, this repo's history — is the equivalent reasoning for full nodes. The implicit answer seems to be "node operators are compensated by self-interest, not by the protocol," which is coherent, but I've never seen it stated and defended as a deliberate design decision — only assumed by omission.
Three concrete questions:
Is "self-interest, not protocol payment" a conscious economic model MRL has actually reasoned through and endorsed (as opposed to proof-of-work security), or is it inherited from Bitcoin's assumptions without being independently re-examined for Monero's specific threat model?
Is the obvious objection — that unpaid node-running pushes non-technical users toward a handful of remote nodes, re-centralizing exactly what full nodes are meant to prevent — considered a real risk, or judged negligible? Is there any data (node count over time, remote-node usage share) that settles this either way?
Has a node-incentive design ever been seriously modeled for Monero (in the spirit of the fee-market or tail-emission-size discussions in this repo, e.g. #150, #152) and rejected — and if so, on what grounds? Sybil-resistance is the obvious blocker, but I'd like to know if that's actually the argument that killed it, or just the assumed one.
I'm not asking because I expect a node to get "paid" — I understand it isn't a scarce/costly resource the way hashrate is, and payment-per-node is trivially Sybil-able. I'm asking because the asymmetry (miners paid forever, node operators never) is publicly justified on one side of the pair but not the other, and I'd like to know whether that's a settled, examined position or an inherited assumption nobody's revisited.
I'm setting up a pruned full node (not mining) on a small always-on machine, for the standard reasons: sovereign verification of my own transactions, contributing to network decentralization, not depending on a remote node.
Reading the tail emission documentation, the stated purpose is explicit: pay miners forever because mining is the costly, hard-to-fake resource that secures block production — without payment, hashrate (and thus security) would drop. That reasoning is clear and makes sense to me.
What I can't find anywhere — official docs, Moneropedia, this repo's history — is the equivalent reasoning for full nodes. The implicit answer seems to be "node operators are compensated by self-interest, not by the protocol," which is coherent, but I've never seen it stated and defended as a deliberate design decision — only assumed by omission.
Three concrete questions:
Is "self-interest, not protocol payment" a conscious economic model MRL has actually reasoned through and endorsed (as opposed to proof-of-work security), or is it inherited from Bitcoin's assumptions without being independently re-examined for Monero's specific threat model?
Is the obvious objection — that unpaid node-running pushes non-technical users toward a handful of remote nodes, re-centralizing exactly what full nodes are meant to prevent — considered a real risk, or judged negligible? Is there any data (node count over time, remote-node usage share) that settles this either way?
Has a node-incentive design ever been seriously modeled for Monero (in the spirit of the fee-market or tail-emission-size discussions in this repo, e.g. #150, #152) and rejected — and if so, on what grounds? Sybil-resistance is the obvious blocker, but I'd like to know if that's actually the argument that killed it, or just the assumed one.
I'm not asking because I expect a node to get "paid" — I understand it isn't a scarce/costly resource the way hashrate is, and payment-per-node is trivially Sybil-able. I'm asking because the asymmetry (miners paid forever, node operators never) is publicly justified on one side of the pair but not the other, and I'd like to know whether that's a settled, examined position or an inherited assumption nobody's revisited.