100M 'holders' and 100K verifiers. White paper's second sentence is a warning most people skipped. Bitcoin doesn't get softer because you outsource verification to someone else.

Nodes don't matter as 8/8/26 showed. Even if they did, a pruned node is pointless. You don't hold the chain data and therefore one drive failure means you lose your proof of chain and must redownload the IBD, which means trust again. Full node or you're LARPing.

I mean nodes on Blake2b. Running a node on SHA256 is indeed pointless, bortherline insane at this point.

I still think nodes without at least some hashpower behind them are not very useful even on Blake2B. And my point about pruned nodes still stands. A network of leechers is not a network.

Absolutely. The only uses that I see of public notes are: 1. either as a reference to give to someone who is having trouble refreshing his wallet (and doesn't yet see the transaction you sent to him), or 2. as a temporary measure until the initial block download is completed on your node.

Miners don’t decide, unless they’re too big and too centralised. Case and point: the soft fork with version 29.4.2. The split resolved in a few hours, miners that didn’t update in time lost blocks to other miners that did update. This wouldn’t be possible on SHA256, even if was an emergency soft fork and everyone agreed that it’s not contentious. On the other issue: full node is best, pruned node is a compromise but it’s still better than no node and using someone else’s to transact and validate your own balance.

Or to help you send your BTC to an exchange to dump it 😂

For that, I just use public nodes because on sha256, I just have the spamcoin that the big nodes say I do. So I figured that I would skip the middleman (my node) and go straight to the source of Truth. 🤣 I shut down my sha256 node when blake2b came to life.

That just moves centralization into the dev space. Also, of what use is a dissenting voice if "you don't update in time." Is there some reason a stratum V1 mining pool can't operate on XBT? If not, then the ability to centralize mining still exists. This is the entire problem in Bitcoin mining, it's not enough to have distributed block templates if the option to have a pool with centralized block templates exists.

Les nœuds publics n’auraient jamais dû se généraliser dans le réseau Bitcoin. On estime à 100 millions le nombre de personnes « possédant » des BTC, mais seules 100 000 d’entre elles interagissent avec le réseau sans recourir à des tiers de confiance. C’est un compromis désastreux. La deuxième phrase même du livre blanc met en garde contre cela. Si vous ne disposez pas de 2 To à consacrer à un nœud complet, ou si vous ne souhaitez pas vous engager à faire tourner un serveur 24 h/24 et 7 j/7, un nœud allégé sur votre ordinateur portable est bien meilleur qu’un nœud public. Il vous suffit de 40 Go d’espace disque libre pour télécharger l’IBD, puis vous pouvez l’alléger jusqu’à environ 4 Go. Cela équivaut à un film en HD. Il suffit d’ouvrir n’importe quel terminal. Si vous êtes sur Mac, ouvrez Terminal. Si vous êtes sous Windows, ouvrez PowerShell en tant qu’administrateur. Demandez au clanker les commandes pour exécuter un nœud Knots allégé, indiquez-lui le site web officiel, puis commencez à copier-coller. L’IA vous guidera tout au long du processus : téléchargement, synchronisation, vérification des clés PGP, création d’une interface graphique sur votre bureau, configuration du nœud pour qu’il démarre automatiquement, connexion à votre portefeuille, tout y passe. Même si vous n’y connaissez absolument rien en informatique, vous pouvez y arriver en une heure ou deux. Essayez, vous verrez. Via @Tauri | Bitcoin (XBT) View quoted note →

Tauri's post catches my attention because it reflects something highly valuable: a curious mind looking for patterns that might help Bitcoin grow. The question matters, even though some of its technical implications are beyond my current understanding. But the figures themselves made me wonder. If roughly 100 million people own Bitcoin, while only around 100,000 are said to interact with the network without trusted third parties, what exactly are we measuring? Ownership? Independent verification? The degree to which people actually participate in the network? And what would have to change for Bitcoin ownership to evolve into a genuinely self-sustaining economic ecosystem? If these figures are even approximately accurate, they suggest that ownership alone tells us relatively little about how far we have come. Running a node, holding bitcoin, transacting, building businesses and accepting payments are all different forms of participation. They are not interchangeable, but they may reinforce one another. Clearly, the maturity of Bitcoin cannot be measured by ownership alone, or even by the number of nodes. Therefore the central distinction, to me, is between economic activity that happens around Bitcoin and economic activity that strengthens Bitcoin itself. Capital flowing into Bitcoin, financial products built around it, and businesses profiting from its price may generate enormous economic value. But that does not necessarily mean they strengthen Bitcoin's role as a monetary network. The deeper question is how much economic activity actively reinforces the network by creating genuine demand for its monetary properties, expanding its use in voluntary exchange, deepening its liquidity, and supporting the infrastructure and participation that allow it to endure. In other words, does the economy emerging around Bitcoin merely benefit from the network, or does it also help sustain and strengthen the network on which it depends? What kind of economy does Bitcoin need in order for its own foundations to efficiently grow through its use? This is where the exploration is leading: beyond Bitcoin as an asset, towards the conditions under which a healthy ecosystem, integrated by decentralized nodes operating under one protocol, can continuously and coherently adapt to change. View quoted note →

I'm curious about the numbers. Where does the estimate of 100 million Bitcoin owners come from, and how are the 100,000 people interacting without trusted third parties being counted? Are these based on separate datasets, or is the latter inferred from node counts?

I have an old Macbook with 10.12, id love to dedicate it to running a node but most software nowadays isnt backwards compatible. I know its a minority case but frustrating notxa le to participate.

@KompassFrei my guess is the 100k comes from node counts. bitnodes shows around 20k reachable nodes, and estimates that add nodes not accepting incoming connections land several times higher. the 100 million usually comes from exchange surveys, which count accounts more than people.