 There's been a lot of talk about mining equipments and the overall pico hash. How much does it stand for? It's at around 3,500 pico hash right now, but there's no talk about how many nodes are there and what technology they are using Can you please explain a little bit about the role that nodes play in the protocol and everything? That's a great question. Thank you so much. So we've discussed mining and a lot of people focus on mining It's actually a problem that people focus on mining because mining is an enabling technology in Bitcoin But it is by no means the only technology in Bitcoin. It is not even the most interesting technology in Bitcoin It's part of a constellation of technologies that work together. I ask this question of audiences often I assume you all use the internet yes you have used the I'm not talking about Facebook. I'm talking about the internet All right, who here has a working understanding of the purpose mechanics and applications of the border gateway protocol BGP One two three I'm counting myself Excellent did you have any idea that without that the internet doesn't work did you have any idea that in fact That protocol BGP is responsible for getting your packets from here to there everywhere in the world It is the most essential technology underlying the world routing system and you use BGP every single day It's just that you didn't know you were using it right It's almost like turning on your water and being oblivious to the process of filtration and chlorination That ensures that you don't get typhoid from it and that is the same with BGP and it's the same with mining Mining is a technology that miners need to know about just like BGP is a technology that service providers And routing experts need to know about but the average user does not On the other hand Nodes are important nodes are like servers on the internet, but they have an even more important role So what is a node a node is simply a computer that is participating in the global Bitcoin network By speaking a protocol that for further confusion is called Bitcoin The protocol the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network protocol to be more specific Is a protocol that allows these nodes on the network to communicate with each other And what they do is they propagate transactions and blocks everywhere You can run one of these in fact you should there are about 10,000 nodes that we know of that advertise their presence By listening on specific ports in a way that can be discovered There's probably five or six times as many that do not advertise their services That listen or do not listen on open ports or even that are hidden behind various protocols like Tor And things like that and listen on hidden ports In general the nodes that are participating in Bitcoin serve the most important purpose Every one of them acts as an authoritative verifier of every single transaction and block That type of node is called more precisely a full node or even more precisely a fully validating node A fully validating node may also keep a full copy of the blockchain the entire ledger on its hard drive It doesn't have to it can be a fully validating node with a reduced copy of the blockchain It communicates by random process of connection with a set of peers that it chooses from the network And it doesn't trust these peers it monitors these peers and every time it receives a transaction or a block from them The other peer says here's a transaction that is happening on the Bitcoin network and your node goes so you say let's see And takes it and independently verifies every aspect of that transaction It authoritatively reconciles it with its own copy of the ledger to determine whether the funds have been double spent And if you send that node a transaction that is incorrect it will not only reject the transaction it will stop talking to you So go ah ah ah no you lied not talking to you for 24 hours and I go stand in the corner A node that tries to propagate incorrect information is very quickly isolated because all of the nodes that it attempts to communicate with You ban it and disconnect from it there are levels of offense there are some things that are so egregious that they'll get you permanently banned And there are some things that will only get you dropped for an hour or so and it varies but the important thing is the nodes don't trust each other They authoritatively and fully validate every transaction why would you run one of these things because you want to be in control of your money Because the whole purpose of Bitcoin is that you don't trust anyone else to tell you what the truth is You trust only in the execution of the consensus rules and the independent verification that they do I run a fully validating node in fact I run several of them and I cross check them Every service provider every exchange every wallet company every company that interacts with Bitcoin Every individual that wants this same level of authority and autonomy runs a fully validating node nodes decide what the rules are Not minors minors get the transactions that nodes decided were valid and they give back blocks at the pleasure of the nodes That will decide if they are worthy of being propagated because they're valid the validity of the consensus rules is not determined by minors They sequence transactions into a block the validity of the consensus rules is determined by nodes because they will not propagate lies That's the importance of a node if you can run one hundred and twenty gig of disk space couple of gigs of monthly bandwidth four gigs of RAM Dual or four core CPU plug it into your DSL turn it on be part of the revolution and money and more importantly at that point in time You no longer need to ask anyone did a transaction happen is it confirmed is it valid you now have an authoritative record of your own That answers that question without appeal to any authority that is really running Bitcoin so thank you for asking that question that was a great question