Node Runners: Guardians of the Timechain

Block 897,022

You can easily fit 10,000 people in a small arena. Most college basketball stadiums can hold 10,000 people. Remarkably (and sadly), perhaps as few as 10,000 people secure the entire Bitcoin network - a network worth two trillion dollars!

Who are these 10,000 people? They are node runners, the guardians of the timechain.

The three main components of Bitcoin are miners, nodes, and wallets.* Of these, nodes are perhaps the most important for the Bitcoin network. Node runners protect Bitcoin by choosing which version of the Bitcoin software they will run. This software determines the rules of Bitcoin, and one of the most famous taglines in Bitcoin is "rules, not rulers."

Wallets piece together transactions and broadcast them to the network. Miners assemble transactions into blocks and add them to the blockchain. Sitting between the two, are nodes. The nodes check transactions from wallets to ensure they are following the rules, and the nodes validate blocks from miners to make sure they are following the rules. Thus, the nodes are enforcing the rules and keeping everyone honest.

During the blocksize war (2015-2017), miners wanted to change the Bitcoin code to accommodate larger blocks, up to 10MB. This change would certainly have destroyed Bitcoin, because the blockchain would soon become so large that everyday folks would not be able to run a node. Mining had already gotten out of reach for everyday folks (it was not that way in the beginning); if nodes were out reach, the entire network would become centralized and that would defeat the entire purpose of Bitcoin. Even though mining companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the campaign, often with the backing of some of the most influential Bitcoiners at the time, they failed. Everyday node runners refused to run their altered version of Bitcoin, and the miners had no choice but to concede, otherwise their blocks would be rejected by the nodes and the considerable amount of money spent on mining would be wasted.

Today, another war is brewing. The developers ("devs") for Bitcoin Core have seemingly been compromised. They are seeking to alter Bitcoin to make it easier to include spam on the blockchain. Why would they do this? Turns out, most of them are funded by spam-producing corporations. To make matters worse, the Core devs have insulted everyday Bitcoiners who oppose the decision, calling them unworthy to even have an opinion, and they even blocked influencers who questioned their motives or called out their conflicts of interest. As a result, a large number of node runners (myself included) have switched their nodes to Bitcoin Knots, a version that blocks all spam.

As you can see, node runners are truly the guardians of the blockchain. They protect the network from hostile miners, rogue developers, and other threats (e.g., wallets making bad transactions). Yet, there may only be a few thousand of us. According to timechaincalendar.com, there are only about 20,000 nodes on the entire planet. Since most node runners actually run more than one, there are perhaps only 10,000 people globally running nodes. To be fair, these are reachable nodes, and there may be up to 100,000 unreachable nodes running on the dark web. I hope so!

Everyone who holds wealth in bitcoin should run a node. In addition to protecting the network from corrupting influences, running a node increases your privacy. You can explore the blockchain, including your own transactions, privately using your own node. Otherwise, anytime you broadcast a transaction or explore the chain, you are using someone else's node and, in theory, they can spy on you. Indeed, we know there are nodes run by chain analysis surveillance companies (e.g., glassnode.com) that do spy on users. Protect your privacy, and protect the network, by running your own Bitcoin node!

Come to our meetup tomorrow to learn more about nodes and how to run one.

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*Throughout this discussion, the words "miners", "nodes", and "wallets" are used to refer to either computers or the people that run them. Thus, miner may refer to a computer, or miner may refer to the person that runs that computer.