The most popular software wallets rely per default on a 3rd-party hosted node. Except for miners, there is no built-in incentive to run a full node despite this piece of infrastructure being critical to the network.Īs a result, most users interacting with the blockchain will, voluntarily or not, use a centralized piece of infrastructure. Running a full node 24/7 requires a good level of knowledge and resources that most users are understandably not willing to invest.
At a much smaller scale, they might also do it by pure altruism to help the network. Individual users might want to run a full node because it is the most secure way to interact with the blockchain. Think about miners, block explorers, exchanges. Nowadays, organizations and individuals run full nodes because they need it for their business. An HDD cannot keep up with the needed input/output operations per second. As an example, using an SSD is now required to fully synchronize the Ethereum blockchain. However, downloading and verifying the whole chain of blocks takes time and resources. Because of the trustless environment (the open internet) and the nature of a blockchain, each full node needs to download and verify every single block, and therefore every single transaction in each block.īoth Parity Ethereum and Geth, the two most popular Ethereum clients, can run on a moderately powerful laptop today. This software is responsible for verifying and relaying the transactions and blocks on the network. In the case of Ethereum, there used to be only one type of node, now referred to as a full node. This is the reason why the term node is also used in place of client. Because all these clients talk to each other, they form a network where each client is a node. In the context of a blockchain, a client is a software that connects to other clients in a peer-to-peer manner. An internet browser, for instance, is a client-it connects to a website’s server to request its content. A client in computer science is a piece of hardware or software that connects to a server. In this article, I will explain in simple words what a light client is, what it isn’t, and where it comes from.īefore talking about what a light client is, let’s start by clarifying what a client is. They help users access and interact with a blockchain in a secure and decentralized manner without having to sync the full blockchain. Light clients are crucial elements in blockchain ecosystems.
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