Best ideas win around here so I’m curious to see where this conversation goes.
Regarding your question about what is a Sentinel. As I understand it, a Sentinel is a full node that is tasked with relaying messages a minimum of 3 hops and adds PoW links to each message. Alien posted some recent research into this idea and why it’s valuable. Maybe you read that paper.
So my original question was, why can’t the Sentinel serve as an incentivized public node in the network. They are a full node and they are incentivized.
I guess I did not fully appreciate that nodes really don’t offer network security like BTC. So if that is the case, why are more nodes better? Why aren’t Sentinel nodes enough as the main public node in the network. And how many Sentinels are necessary to perform the message relay function and to act as a public node?
I’ll look at the white paper again to try and learn more.