⚡Maintaining Speed Force

At its core, Speed Force requires very little resources to run. To make a transaction, you cryptographically sign a short sequence of data and send it to nodes to turn it into a block and propagate the block through the network. When another node receives the block, it runs it through a series of simple checks, such as verifying signatures and checking the blocks it references, and adds a new entry to its block database. A normal PC is enough to run a Speed Force node.

Incentives

Fundamentally, Speed Force only regulates communication between its nodes, not between nodes and end users, and random nodes have no incentive to put your transaction to work. Public nodes process transactions from strangers in good spirits, but they can go offline or put your transaction at the end of the queue at any time. If you need a reliable connection to the Tangle, the only way to get it is to run your own Speed Force node.

If you're a casual user and do one or two transactions a day, this isn't enough to convince you: if your transaction doesn't go through, you can wait a few more seconds or try a different node. But imagine you run a local business, cryptocurrency exchange or smart contract chain that accepts payments in $SF tokens. In this case, you need to connect to Speed Force as reliably as possible, and you will be running your own node.

You can read more about rewards in this blog post.

Deterrents

Although Speed Force is lightweight, malicious actors can still misuse its resources to cause network slowdowns or denial of service. To do this, Speed Force had to introduce additional restrictions on its use to ensure fairness for everyone.

Storage Deposit

Every unspent output must be stored on each node's hardware. For example, a base output will store the amount of tokens and the address of their owner. There is no limit, someone can split his token into millions of outputs, or create an NFT output with extremely long metadata. To address this, the available data storage is allocated in proportion to the $SF tokens associated with the output. This is called a storage deposit, and if a newly created output has too few $SF tokens to cover the size of the output, the block it contains will be rejected by network nodes. These measures keep the ledger's database size below XXX GB.

Proof of Work

A node could start publishing so many blocks that it would clog the network. To prevent this, the Speed Force network requires issuing nodes to perform some idle work. It only affects a single node and not the rest of the network, and it distributes the network's throughput fairly among all nodes.