0 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: ⚡ Lightning Network Megathread ⚡
What is your incentive to run a full node?
I don't see why a LN node would need more CPU resources than a full node. All depends on what it is used for and to which nodes it connects, right?
Why do people contribute to open source software?
Comment by Bobanaut at 12/01/2018 at 17:10 UTC
15 upvotes, 2 direct replies
a full node allows me easy and fast access to the whole blockchain and if i ever need it to the mempool. sure i could use a custom client to just get the data, but it doesn't hurt me... and it's not using a noticeable amount of my system.
but a LN node is a completely different beast. while a BTC node only needs to validate blocks (sigcheck) every 10 minutes a LN node is a completely different monster.
Once the network scales big enough there will be a huge number of transactions going everywhere, 3 hops through onion routing, then generation of at least 4 ecdsa keypairs per update...
i just don't see it working with my current CPU being able to only generate 3000 ecdsa keypairs per second at full utilization ...
this costs energy, lots of energy... a miner gets the reward and fees... a LN node doesn't get anything
Also OSS doesn't ask you for more than your free time and much less for the power this time costs.