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@ Jacopo Graziuso
2025-05-24 12:07:40
🔒 Who's really in charge of Bitcoin? Full nodes.
🌍 It is not the miners, nor the developers, nor the companies. In Bitcoin, the real power is distributed among thousands of complete nodes, software that verifies every block and transaction according to shared rules. That's why they're critical to the network's resilience and governance.
🧠 Nodes dictate the rules.
- Miners propose blocks, but nodes decide whether to accept them.
- Any node can reject non-compliant transactions or updates. Consensus occurs when the majority of nodes follow the same rules.
⚔️ Fork: when the rules change
- Soft fork = compliant update (e.g. SegWit).
- Hard fork = net split (e.g. Bitcoin Cash).
📌 Real case: in 2017, nodes forced the activation of SegWit (UASF), giving miners a choice: adapt or stay out.
🛡 Defense against attacks:
- ✂️ Censorship? Nodes can reject blocks that exclude valid transactions.
- 💸 Inflation? No block can create more BTC than expected: nodes will reject it.
- 🕸 Network attacks? Nodes filter suspicious connections and protect traffic, even when using Tor or mesh networks.
💰 Nodes guarantee the 21 million limit. It's not enough to "write it in the code": only nodes enforce the limit by checking every single block.
🏛 Political and economic impact
Thanks to the nodes:
- No one can arbitrarily change bitcoin.
- No one can control it from the top.
- No one can violate its monetary policy.
➡️ Bitcoin is resilient because the nodes are sovereign. "Don't trust, verify" is not just a slogan, but an active defense mechanism.
❓️ What is a Lightning Network node?
📶 Stay tuned.
#bitcoin #node #fork #attacks #political #economic
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