Thank you for the comment, MMT.

The defining characteristic of a volunteer is that they are unpaid not that they are unmotivated. If people have motivations to run infrastructure (not just consuming data — which puts a cost burden on others — but providing for consumption by others) then there is nothing wrong with a volunteer-powered model.

At a certain point scale requires for-profit commercial provision, because even Girl Scouts won’t sell your cookies week-after-week if you’re not paying them. There’s a good case that the draw of sovereign money can induce people to help bear the load, but the BTC devs are certainly aware of the limits and have said as much during the blocksize debates.

Thank you for the comment, Jess. Please note that you can find Satoshi’s need for volunteers in section 5.1 of the Bitcoin whitepaper where he explicitly requires all transactions to be shared with all nodes prior to the commencement of hashing.

Eliminating this step is not possible without eliminating the open-access properties of the network, and we know it requires volunteers as the for-profit provision of “fee collecting and sharing” is subject to market failure. If you pay to collect and share inbound transactions for instance, then others maximize their own income either by not sharing or (should that slow block propagation) simply making blocks using the transactions you have already shared.

We have empirical confirmation of this problem in ETH where miners are free-riding on Infura and in BSV where the dominant commercial miner is open about not sharing its privately-sourced transaction flow. There are examples in other networks like EOS as well.

I do agree that players with a “vested financial interest” may provide temporary infrastructure for strategic reasons. Most scalable projects are funding infrastructure by venture investments and subsidies from token-rich development teams. But these are not sustainable economic models: all they technically do is swapping in a larger and richer volunteer until the funds run out.

1. The network does NOT depend on volunteers. The network depends only on people who have a vested financial interest in preserving the blockchain: the miners who create the chain for profit, and the businesses, governments, large holders, and other entities who have an incentive to keep their own local copy of the chain. The notion that the network requires volunteers is an entirely false narrative that was foisted on Bitcoin from the outside and which is not shared by Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

2. So referring back to this quote “from each according to his ability, to the miners according to their hashpower” we can safely change it to “from each according to his need, to each according to his work performed” is a fairly capitalistic model after all.