Looking for beta testers: a Bitcoin-inspired PoW blockchain experimenting with full node incentives

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This is exactly the core challenge. I agree that rewarding "a node" is too vague. The hard part is defining a contribution that the network can verify without turning the system into a Sybil farm. At the moment, I see the project as an experiment in that direction rather than a solved design. The questions you raised are the same ones I'm trying to answer: How do we distinguish useful nodes from merely online nodes? How do we make rewards expensive to fake? How do we avoid reputation systems that can be self-reinforcing? How do we prevent the bootstrap layer from becoming a trust bottleneck? My current thinking is that rewards should be tied to verifiable network services rather than simple registration or uptime, but I'm still exploring what can be measured in a decentralized way without introducing excessive complexity. This is exactly the type of criticism I'm looking for, so thank you. Good point regarding the bootstrap and snapshot layer. My intention is for snapshots to be a synchronization convenience, not a source of consensus. A node should still verify the chain and consensus rules independently after loading a snapshot. In other words, the snapshot provider should not be trusted to define the state of the network, only to accelerate access to it. That said, I agree there is a legitimate risk that users may treat bootstrap infrastructure as a trusted service in practice, even if the protocol does not require that trust. That's something I want to think about more carefully as the project evolves. The broader goal is to avoid creating a situation where the economic incentives are decentralized but the practical onboarding path becomes centralized.