Bitcoin has an incentive gap
Miners get paid. Exchanges get paid. Wallet companies get paid. But the people running the actual infrastructure that makes Bitcoin work? They pay out of pocket.
Ghost doesn't change Bitcoin's rules.
It pays people for running better infrastructure.
Why run a Ghost Node?
Ghost node operators earn Bitcoin by providing valuable services to the network. This isn't a centralised payout system — it's a decentralised incentive layer where nodes verify each other's work and vote on rewards before every distribution.
⚙️ How the reward system works
- 1 Nodes earn shares (up to 15) based on the services they provide — archive storage, public mining endpoints, policy enforcement, and more.
- 2 Nodes continuously monitor their peers through health checks, verifying uptime, sync status, and service availability.
- 3 When a block is found, nodes calculate payout proposals independently and broadcast them to the network.
- 4 A 67% supermajority must agree on the payout distribution before any rewards are released — no single entity controls the outcome.
- 5 Your reward is proportional to your shares versus total network shares. More services = larger share of the pool.
Where do rewards come from? Ghost Pool charges a 1% fee on block subsidies only — never on transaction fees. Half goes to a capped treasury (21 BTC max, then decays to zero), the other half flows directly to the Node Reward Pool. Miners keep 99% of subsidies. The node that the winning miner was connected to receives 100% of all transaction fees.
What a Ghost node does for Bitcoin
When you maximize your node shares, you're not gaming a system — you're doing real work that strengthens the network.
Archive nodes store the complete blockchain — every block, every transaction, since genesis. New nodes need this data to sync. Historical analysis depends on it. Ghost makes running an archive node economically rational instead of purely altruistic.
Every Ghost node can offer public Stratum endpoints. This means miners anywhere can find low-latency connections without relying on a handful of mega-pools. Block construction spreads geographically. Censorship resistance improves. No protocol change required.
Nodes can opt into "pure" mempool and block policies — prioritizing monetary transactions over arbitrary data. This isn't censorship (anyone can still mine anything). It's economic expression of what Bitcoin should be used for. A freedom that already exists, now incentivized.
Ghost Pay provides fast, private payments that settle back to Bitcoin. No new token. No block size increase. No consensus change. Activity happens off-chain, finality happens on-chain. Bitcoin stays lean while becoming more useful.
What you get
In return for strengthening Bitcoin, you receive:
Trade-offs we chose
Ghost isn't magic. Here's what you're signing up for:
Ghost nodes can do more than standard Bitcoin Core nodes. That means more configuration options and more moving parts.
If Ghost becomes widely used, it will have economic gravity. People might depend on it. That's influence, even if it's not control.
Nodes that provide more services earn more. Nodes that don't want to enable features earn less. That's the whole point — but critics may call it "nudging."
What Ghost does NOT do
"The 'negative' of Bitcoin Ghost is not that it harms Bitcoin — it's that it exposes how much unpaid work nodes already do."
Ghost is one answer to that uncomfortable truth. Participation is optional. Exit is always available. Bitcoin remains sovereign.
Start Running a Node