Some people have asked me recently: What is an "economic node?" It's a #Bitcoin #node that is directly involved in a monetary transaction. Here are four ways that a node can be directly involved in a transaction:
1. Creating a transaction. This is often called "transaction coordination." You need to know if you've got money in your wallet before you can send.
2. Broadcasting the transaction to the bitcoin network. (You can add some privacy by doing this with your own node.)
3. Verifying that you actually received funds. For the average bitcoin user, this is by far the most important thing you can do with your node. If you rely on others to tell if you received anything, they could trick you.
4. Mining. Miners need to see the previous blocks, and if they want to earn fees then they need to see the pool of new transactions (AKA mempool).
A node can also be indirectly involved in a transaction by distributing new transactions to other nodes, and filtering out bad transactions. This filtering is the main issue between #core v30 and #knots.
