The Redundancy of Full Nodes in Bitcoin: A Network-Theoretic Demonstration of Miner-Centric Propagation Topologies

Abstract

This paper formally examines the network structure of Bitcoin CORE (BTC) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) using complex graph theory to demonstrate that home-hosted full nodes are incapable of participating in or influencing the propagation topology. Leveraging established models such as scale-free networks and small-world connectivity, we demonstrate that the propagation graph is dominated by a densely interconnected miner clique, while full nodes reside on the periphery, excluded from all transaction-to-block inclusion paths. Using simulation-backed metrics and eigenvalue centrality analysis, we confirm that full nodes are neither critical nor operationally relevant for consensus propagation.