My Censored Question to Craig Wright

I tried to get a question in to CSW on a Bitcoin(dotcom) Q&A with Craig Wright, where I ask him about the role of Full Validating Nodes on the Bitcoin network, but my question got ‘flagged as spam’…

I am adding the question here where Roger and Co can’t censor it:

Discussion on Bitcoin.com 56 comments

Craig Wright on “The Risks of Segregated Witness: Opening the Door to Mining Cartels”

Thεo -> Craig Wright 4 months ago

Detected as spam Thanks, we’ll work on getting this corrected.

“All nodes mine”
There it is again, a psalm at the church. ‘Believers’ then go on to state that all non-mining nodes on the network are mere passive wallets, and they then cast full validating nodes in the same heap. In your analysis, this is a flawed assumption. Furthermore the flaw seems deliberate, as one should know better, and one that is intended to deceive. I digress.

Let me put it like this:
- A mining node does not distinguish if it is receiving validation information from another miner, or from a fully validating node. It can’t.
- A mining node does not do any extra checks to verify if a block broadcast was sent by a mining node or the nearest validating node.
- If it receives a valid block signal from a validating node, it treats it the same as if that information came from a miner — as it can’t distinguish one from the other.
- The only node hat can be called a miner at any one given time is the actual node that solved the POW. All other mining nodes are simply ‘nodes that did not get the block’ and they appear no different than any other full validating node.

Sure, a full validating node does not ‘create history’, but if it detects invalid blocks/forks/txs, it will disconnect from the ‘offending node’ as will all other nodes, in effect isolating the node/miner and leaving it with no ability to broadcast its block to the network. When a full validating node disconnects from another node, it also doesn’t know if it is disconnecting from a mining node or a non mining node — it does not do an ‘authority check’ — it validates.

Disconnecting from a node that broadcast an invalid tx/block/fork is “not doing nothing”. A mining node that broadcasts to the network with a block that contradicts consensus will isolate itself by doing so and then not be able to propagate blocks — this is what keeps miners ‘honest’ as honest is not a term of endearment here, it is a technical term.

Beyond that, the actual ASIC chip on a mining farm that solves the block is ‘dumb’ to the network and broadcasts its find to the farm’s node, which is a full validating node, which then broadcasts it’s find to the nearest nodes.

Nodes can operate without ASICs. You can run them with an ASIC, or with a CPU or GPU/s (although not competitively any more, but certainly when the WP was penned) and you can run a full validating node without a mining rig. It still seeds the network, validates, relays etc. User wallets do not.

But you know this, so why the narrative?

And screenshot:

Screenshot