# Last edited on 2015-12-18 17:10:36 by stolfilocal

The protocol, as designed by Satoshi, had only two kinds of players: full nodes (which, to Satoshi, meant miners) and simple clients that trust them.  Miners do all the work, namely they validate and confirm the transactions, and vote on the "official" blockchain.  Tehey receive fees and rewards that are supposed to encourage them to work as intended -- in particular, process all the transactions they get from clients, as fast as they can.

There was no space in that design for "full but non-mining" (FNM) nodes, since they lack all the gears and levers that make mining nodes work.  

+ For starters, they do not get any reward or fees, so there are no economical incentives to entice them to work in the intended ways. Those FNM nodes that exist are therefore moved by other motives, and who knowns what they could be.  

+ There is no majority voting among FNM nodes, so there is no way to find, or even define, their collective consensus on anything.  For example, different FNM noves will give very different values for the size of the backlog and the fee distribution in it.

+ While the block proof-of-work prevents miners from falsifying their votes with fake clones, there is no mechanism to prevent a FNM node from spawing a million clones that actually are just passthroughs of the master node.  A client can never know whether the 8 FNM nodes that he connects to are the same malicious agent.

+ Whereas the miners have incentives (in theory at least) to include every transaction that they get from other clients, the FNM nodes have the incentive to *reject* transactions, since they cost them internet bandwidth and they get nothing in return.

+ It makes no sense at all for the FNM nodes to filter or prioritize transactions by fees.  The fees are meant to the miners.  The miners -- not the developers, not the FNM nodes, not anyone else -- should be the ones defining and enforcing fee policies.

For all this and possibly more, FNM nodes are not only meaningless, but in fact harmful for bitcoin.  It is like putting sails on railroad cars.

FNM nodes were obviously a lame attempt to mask the fact that mining became concentrated in half a dozen companies -- and in two countries, neither of which is the country where most bitcoin pioneers and big holders live.  They are presented as the "conscience" of the network, the Guardians of the CryptoRevolution that manage the client transactions and prevent the miners from doing "bad things".  In truth, their purpose is to let the Western community pretend that bitcoin is still decentralized and that the Western bitcoiners still have some control.