The world of cryptocurrency remains one of competition, even though various ecosystems can coexist without any issues. The Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems often seem to be at war with one another, even though they could not be more different. A new tweet by Gavin Andresen about the network nodes for Bitcoin and Ethereum has the community riled up once again.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Network Nodes Are Very Different
Gavin Andresen posted on Twitter that he feels the number of Ethereum full nodes will continue to outpace Bitcoin nodes. While the number of Ethereum nodes is indeed higher than Bitcoin’s, that does not mean all that much right now. Full bitcoin nodes verify the entire blockchain at all times, whereas their Ethereum counterparts do not necessarily do so.
Unfortunately, bandwidth is a determining factor for the decentralization of full nodes. Most of the network nodes for either Bitcoin and Ethereum are not hosted on home computers, but rather use cloud services. These packages have limited space regarding the amount of data can be stored, as well as how much bandwidth can be used by these servers. Nodes that do not need to validate the full blockchain and its data are far more preferable.
This also means that the number of Ethereum nodes perceived as full nodes is not entirely correct. There are very few nodes validating all of the information being processed by the blockchain around the clock. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it is an important distinction. This has also contributed to the successful Ethereum hard fork, as there were fewer full nodes that needed to upgrade.
It is rather odd to see Gavin post such statements on Twitter:
Ethereum has more nodes today than Bitcoin. Prediction: it's lead will grow even as its blockchain size exceeds bitcoin's.
— Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) September 25, 2016
Quite a few cryptocurrency community members are starting to doubt Gavin’s position in the bitcoin space. While he still deserves a lot of respect from Bitcoiners around the world, his reputation has taken some hits. After all, he was fooled by Craig Wright into thinking he was Satoshi Nakamoto, although the evidence presented could have fooled other people as well, in most cases.
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