#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
Earlier, I assumed that everyone running a blockchain node was doing the same job and getting paid for it. Nodes secure the network, the network rewards them, and that seemed like the whole arrangement.
Looking more closely at how Dusk's network is actually made up, I realized that is only half of what is happening.
Some participants take part in consensus. They are chosen to help produce and confirm blocks, and they receive rewards for it. That is the part everyone talks about.
But a network also needs machines that simply keep a copy of everything, pass transactions along, and answer questions when an application asks something. Those machines are doing real work and receiving nothing for it.
What I found particularly notable is how easy it is to overlook that second group, because they never appear in any statistic. A chain will publish how many validators it has. It rarely publishes how many ordinary nodes exist, or who runs them.
And that matters more than it sounds. When an application connects to a blockchain, it connects through one of those machines. If only a handful exist, then a network with many validators can still have very few places where users actually reach it.
I do not have a reliable picture of this for Dusk, and I am not sure that information is easy to obtain for any young network. So I would rather raise it as a question than pretend to an answer.
But from here I stopped counting validators as if it described a network's health. It describes who is being paid. It does not describe who is holding the thing up.
Earlier, I assumed that everyone running a blockchain node was doing the same job and getting paid for it. Nodes secure the network, the network rewards them, and that seemed like the whole arrangement.
Looking more closely at how Dusk's network is actually made up, I realized that is only half of what is happening.
Some participants take part in consensus. They are chosen to help produce and confirm blocks, and they receive rewards for it. That is the part everyone talks about.
But a network also needs machines that simply keep a copy of everything, pass transactions along, and answer questions when an application asks something. Those machines are doing real work and receiving nothing for it.
What I found particularly notable is how easy it is to overlook that second group, because they never appear in any statistic. A chain will publish how many validators it has. It rarely publishes how many ordinary nodes exist, or who runs them.
And that matters more than it sounds. When an application connects to a blockchain, it connects through one of those machines. If only a handful exist, then a network with many validators can still have very few places where users actually reach it.
I do not have a reliable picture of this for Dusk, and I am not sure that information is easy to obtain for any young network. So I would rather raise it as a question than pretend to an answer.
But from here I stopped counting validators as if it described a network's health. It describes who is being paid. It does not describe who is holding the thing up.