Yesterday, r/Bitcoin moderator StopAndDecrypt published an article on Medium, titled Bitcoin Miners Beware: Invalid Blocks Need Not Apply . The article describes how nodes without hashpower supposedly help secure the network by refusing to relay transactions and blocks that are not valid. There is just one problem.

The entire article is based on the assumption that all nodes, mining or not, is using the default configuration of 8 random connections to other peers on the network. The problem with this assumption is of course that it completely ignores the economic incentives of a mining operation.

If I ran a mining pool, or solo mined at any size, I would want to have direct connections to as many of the other miners as possible, because:

When I find a block, the longer it takes for that block to spread to the other miners, the higher the risk that it ends up losing a race against a competing block of the same height. When someone else finds a block, I'd want to receive it as soon as possible, because all the hashing I do in the meantime is wasted energy.





Because of these two reasons, the economic incentive on miners to maintain direct connections to as many of the other miners as they can is enormous. Sadly we don't (yet) have an empirical study of the actual network topology to prove that this is the case, but to base an entire argument on the assumption that it is not is ignorant and illogical.

Of course, StopAndDecrypt has to, because the implication of these incentives is that there is an actual difference topology-wise of the network between miners and everyone else, even "full-nodes". And if that is the case, the "full-nodes" don't actually matter in the way his argument claims they do.

In fact, as far as the greater network is concerned, they don't matter at all.



