Debunking the “ Nodes do nothing unless they mine” lie

taken from a series of tweets that was getting difficult to follow in reply to https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/963887420604342274

This is an oft repeated lie and tweeting is too disjointed to make sense, so I am posting here.

Full Validating Nodes were added to act as a decentralizing force on Bitcoin consensus. They can be ignored and do not contribute to making history, but they can equally alert a user/all users that is/are not mining if a tx/block/fork they received is invalid.

When all network users that run the same software (primarily Bitcoin Core or derivatives) also detect the same invalid tx/block/fork they disconnect from the mining node that broadcast the invalid block and wait for the next valid block to be served.

This passively but *absolutely* ostracizes the particular mining node from the p2p network of users — the effect being that the miner did not serve a valid block to the users.

Furthermore when a network wide consensus change is agreed on — users upgrading their nodes with the new consensus rules is the only mechanism for users to signal the network which consensus rules they are following.

In this scenario — miners that choose to follow user chosen consensus rules can serve the user network with blocks that are valid in the new user ruleset on a user decided clade. Miners can also decide to not follow user signal and mine different rules thus a new clade.

Miners that do not mine on the user clade would need at minimum for their fork to survive: a) their own set of consensus rules that they continue to mine on b) a viable minority of economic users

So if Bitcoin users want to have any say in the rule-set they prefer and that they are willing to use, transacting economic FVN’s are the only tool they can use to signal to the network which rules they consider valid.

Miners are still free to accept or ignore these nodes, but there are economic consequences to their choice.