Blockchain Revolution

5. THE INCENTIVES ARE INADEQUATE FOR DISTRIBUTED MASS
COLLABORATION
Miners do have an incentive to maintain the bitcoin infrastructure because, if the
network fails, all the unconverted bitcoin they’d earned (or could earn) through
mining would be lost or worthless or otherwise at risk. Before we dig further into
incentives, let’s be clear about the service that miners provide: it is not transaction
validation. Every full node can validate transactions. Rather, miners preserve the
distribution of power—the power to decide which transactions to include in each
block, the power to mint coins, the power to vote on the truth.

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