"The Bitcoin whitepaper is clear about Bitcoin's core feature: it is permissionless. Anyone in the world can pay anyone by joining the peer-to-peer network and broadcasting a transaction. Proof of Work consensus even empowers anybody to become a block producer, and means that the only way to reverse a payment is to overpower everyone else through hashpower. But Proof of Work only defines how to choose a winner amongst competing chains; it does not help a node discover it."
"The job of discovery belongs to the peer-to-peer module, which juggles many contradictory tasks: Find honest peers in a network where nodes constantly join and leave, but without authentication or reputation. Always be on the lookout for blocks and transactions, but don't be surprised if most data is garbage. Be robust enough to survive extreme adversarial conditions, but lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi."
"Many find it amusing that Satoshi suggested every node would mine. Due to the centralizing pressure of mining variability, the vast majority of nodes on today's network do not work on finding a proof-of-work. Perhaps that is an acceptable or even successful result of economic incentives; we traded a portion of decentralization for increased hashpower and thus security."
Bitcoin operates as a permissionless system where anyone can broadcast transactions and Proof-of-Work enables anyone to produce blocks while making reversal possible only by overpowering others with hashpower. Proof-of-Work selects a winning chain but does not help nodes discover competing chains, creating a vulnerability if attackers prevent nodes from hearing about forks. Peer-to-peer discovery must find honest peers amid churn without authentication, relay useful blocks and transactions despite abundant garbage, resist adversarial conditions, and remain lightweight for constrained devices. Implementation of this discovery layer constitutes the bulk of node software complexity and underpins transaction relay and censorship resistance.
Read at Bitcoin Magazine
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