RE: Why Raiblocks Will End as a Pump & Dump
Thank you. I am referring to all the persons, jumping on the hype train.
Why do people run Steem seed, bitcoin or ethereum nodes? What about seeding torrents? There's no incentive to any of these either, yet people do it.
Bitcoin and ethereum network is run by miners, which will earn money for handling transactions and downloading the whole blockchain. If you have a 100 Terabyte Tangle, do you think people will download it just for good will? You mentioned seeding torrents is done without incentive. It is not. It is one of the biggest problems of torrents. Try to download a random torrent and it will be offline 90% of the time. It is exactly the problem I am describing. Blockchain should be persistent. To reach this goal, people need an incentive to download and store the data. No fees makes no sense here. I read many arguments against it and they are all based on good will. Well, I don't want to take the bet, that some people just want to make this world a better place and will invest millions of dollars, just to keep the network alive, without gaining direct profit from it.
There's a lot of em, that's for sure. I can't argue the fomo/hype is out of control at this point - but not all of us just stumbled on this stuff in the past 30-60 days :)
I don't believe this is true, though I'd love to see any information that says otherwise. The network itself is actually decentralized via people running full nodes. The miners are just the ones producing the blocks and earning the rewards. It only takes one (or a few, if you want failover/high availability) bitcoin full nodes to power an entire mining farm. You could setup hundreds/thousands of ASIC devices to mine and use a single full node to feed block headers to all of them and occasionally submit a block.
Then there's the case of mining pools, which arguably is one of the most prevalent forms of mining in terms of individual users. The miners who use pools don't download the blockchain either, the pool does, and they again probably run only a handful of nodes for the entire pool. Those full nodes are not even publicly accessible to the larger network (to prevent DDOS) and hidden behind a stratum. Every home ETH miner you know probably uses a pool and doesn't run a full node, nor do they actually download the entire blockchain. They're taking rewards and not contributing to that P2P distribution.
In the case of Steem (one of the blockchains I know the most about), the witnesses here do download the full blockchain on their "mining" servers, but then they completely firewall it off from the world so that it'll never be discoverable by the rest of the network. The P2P distribution on the Steem blockchain doesn't happen on incentivized nodes either.
The ones who probably run the most full nodes on any blockchain network (and thus distributing on the P2P network) are likely the exchanges and service providers, since they're continually bombarding the APIs with requests to monitor transactions and submit operations at a far greater rate than any miner would.
From what I understand - those who are actually rewarded in mining make up an incredibly small portion of the people who actually download the full blockchain and then redistribute it to others across the P2P network.