Bitcoin Forum

I'm doing some research on Bitcoin nodes and how to increase their numbers.

As part of that I thought I had better get some reference points. These are the results:

https://i.imgur.com/nYfPo7j.jpg

Q1. Can the numbers indicating that there were over 370k nodes be trusted?

Q2. Why was there such a sharp fall in numbers? GPU and then ASICs?

Q3. Is is possible to ever see that number again?

Source for 370k number was worked out from:


edit

BTC user disclosure runs Bitnodes, the source of the above data. He has answered the questions:

China's bubble bursted, thats what happened. Which along with the government restrictions on BTC, short term view of things etc.. I guess they don't see it worth it anymore. They'll come back when the price bubbles to 2K again don't worry.

Earlier running a full node was the only way to have a wallet. Now, there are many lightwight clients and online wallets to give people the ease of use. Naturally people have stopped running a full node. Now-a-days full nodes are mainly run by those who need it, i.e. business to verify their Tx and miners. There are few volunteers who run full node though.

The main driving force was SPV wallets being adopted and the centralization of mining due to ASICs. Those peak node numbers are suspect as well because they weren't being as accurately tracked back than.

It is an interesting question to answer about how much decentralizations optimal? This certainly extends beyond simply the node count and into areas such as mining pools, ASIC manufacturers, exchanges, payment processors, implementations, wallets, ect...

I remember this being predicted as far back as 2010. As mentioned above, there has been a switch away from running a full node. In 2010 you HAD to run one if you wanted to use BTC. Bitcoin is becoming phone based and a full node on a phone makes little sense.

Possibly but they can be faked too since there isn't much evidence. I personally find it hard to believe that there are so much nodes in existence especially since Bitcoin hasn't very much hit the mainstream yet. But the screenshot is likely not to be faked. There are cache (https://web.archive.org/web/20130609095243/http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/) of the page and it does indicate that much node.
There can be people mining on their own BTC core since it wasn't all that competitive at that time. As time passed, competition became much harder and people may be forced to abandon solomining and go pooled mining. The increase in blockchain size may also be one of the factors since many people don't have that much space in their hard drive anymore.
You can, but it is not realistic. People have not much incentive to run a full node again since many wallet services are starting to surface and they offer moderate security features and they are more convenient to use. SPV nodes may be such factor too since they offer basic functions.

it's not a problem.
it's a feature.

it's Bitcoin network rules.
no control, no business interference.

I though that was closer to early 2014?

Yep. Reasons have been given before.

No. Mining had (almost) nothing to do with it. Although that might have contributed, since miners were likely to run full nodes as well. With the concentration of mining, you'd expect a concentration of full nodes as well.
One of the reasons were obviously lightweight wallets.
But most probably the most important factor was a redefinition of how those numbers are estimated. I guess that the ~6000 nodes today only take into account the more or less permanently running nodes, whereas the old numbers also counted nodes that were only connected infrequently. But that's just a guess, I'm unsure how bitnodes.io counts.

Unlikely. But a stable number above let's say 10.000 would probably be nice to have.

Okey , don't insult me and don't call me a noob because I know I'am but I may be correct and i may be wrong (most likely wrong but here to learn) . Why does it matter how nodes there is? We know that nodes helps the network yes but I don't think it does matter or decide the number of Bitcoin users , can't we just assume that this change is caused by people who hate downloading blockchain and use Online wallets / Lightweight wallets as Electrum & Multibit ? since Nodes = Bitcoin core as far as I know.

Too many reasons to give, but mobile and lightweight wallets need full nodes to tell them what the mobile owner owns.

Very good point. Back then Bitcoin QT was basically Bitcoin within itself, now no one wants to use it because it's a pain in the ass. The increasingly demand on the computer to deal with the ever growing Blockchain doesn't give people an incentive big enough to use it. Plus it's very limit within its features. Has no HD addresses, there's no way to sort out addresses, you need a backup everytime you create a new address.. it needs a lot of work to make people come back to it so we can increase the nodes again.

Apparently, ~6000 nodes are enough for that task.

It seems to me that there needs to be a distinction between "running a full node" and running Bitcoin Core.

There may have been 370k people running Bitcoin Core, but how much benefit were they providing to the network? Running Bitcoin Core long enough to sync the block chain and send some bitcoins or view your balance provides very little benefit, especially if you haven't opened port 8333.

I assume the numbers presented have that distinction already made... At least the OP and thread title talk about full nodes.

If you have over 8 connections one can assume that port is open?

Its a good observation and question.

Bitnodes gives details of how their crawler works:

https://github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes/wiki/Provisioning-Bitcoin-Network-Crawler

What is not clear is if the way they measure nodes has changed over time. If it has, that could account for quite a lot of the variance.

centralization of the nodes coupled with Chinese restrictions.

I think that was counting every bitcoin qt and not only full nodes

Now,new countings is counting only full nodes

It doesn't matter if it was counting QT users or not, because it is a fact that the number of nodes has definitely fallen over time and it might start reaching critical levels at some point.
Satoshi had originally described nodes as computer on the networks that were doing the POW. However once mining had shifted from CPUs, the definition of a node changes.
Miners are also technically nodes, however when we talk about nodes we are thinking of relay nodes.

The main problem is that there is no incentive to be a node and there is not enough (is for now) people who would voluntarily run nodes.

There is an incentives program being planned, but it is too early yet to say if it will work technically as paying nodes is difficult without Sybil attackers spoofing the network to steal the incentives.

It is also not clear if the proposals will be generally accepted.

There's not really something like a critical level of nodes.
Well, obviously 0 is too few. Anything above a couple handful is sufficient to keep the blockchain running without too much of a risk of losing the data at some point.
For practical purposes of course, we need a good distribution of nodes to facilitate lightweight use of the blockchain.

https://i.imgur.com/nYfPo7j.jpg

WOW! With their 102 Nodes and decreasing, I now see why Gavin and Hearn are having a hard time tryin' to convince the Chinese...  ::)

blockchain is becoming bigger and more encumbant also service rate of bitcoin is dropping because of the price

The early December 2013 network snapshots, i.e. with over 100k nodes, are not valid as the crawler at that time took several hours just to complete one full network snapshot and it includes all nodes from addr responses which can be faked or likely stale. Those snapshots were linked to from getaddr.bitnodes.io/SNAPSHOT_NUMBER/ which have been removed since.

With the new crawler released in late Dec 2013, the crawl time was brought down significantly down to sub 5 minutes with considerably good churn rate. I use the churn rate to measure how good a network snapshot is. A value of 0 implies the network snapshot was taken instantly but of course that's not possible. At the moment, we are seeing a typical churn rate of 30+: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/

I think that something is definitely going to be needed. However we should look into a lot of options, and try some out. Maybe even crowdfund a few hundreds nodes if we really need them?

Considering the amount of users that Bitcoin has today, do you really think that it would work with 1 single relay node? I don't even want to talk about the bandwidth issues.
What I'm more concerned is the security. With only a single node wouldn't the network be more susceptible to sybil attacks?
Wouldn't it be more easy to DDoS that single node and take the network down for hours (i.e. no relaying of blocks)?

The reality is that we no longer mine Bitcoin using computers CPU's and GPU's. Hence the reduced chances of people installing bitcoin client and becoming a full node even tho they end up using the system to mine on a pool.

That's a definitive answer.

Thanks for helping resolve the issue.

The above explanation would have provide noticeable results quickly, however it does not account the observable drop in nodes over time.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/nodes-btc-ltc.html#log

You can see that there are serious technology implications and mining adoption pertaining to full BTC nodes and the migration from GPU mining to ASIC.

P.S. As to your question "Q3. Is is possible to ever see that number again?"

Introducing incentive by granting % of transaction fee's to the node that relays may help.

No, it would not "work" in the sense that it'd be usable.
But it could still accept transactions, let miners verify them and append new blocks to the chain, technically.

All it takes for bitcoin to survive though, is really just a single copy of the blockchain, not even a running node. ;)

Security is mostly dependent upon the miners, not really the nodes. A hypothetical network of just a single node with hundreds of miners would still be "secure". Sybil attacks would be easy, sure. An attacker could "forge" his own chain by only relaying his own blocks, thereby creating his own network. It'd be hard to tell which one is the "right" one. If you find yourself on the wrong side, you might be in trouble :(

To sum it up, a network with a decent number of nodes is really desirable.

Do bitcoinj (SPV) nodes count in this number?

That is part of the reason, other factors invlove is that the upload download speed people have which impacts the time it takes to download the full client and people tend to install the client from scratch instead of using a snapshot which takes time, besides the size of the Blockchain  light weight clients are seen as more attractive to have because of size and time constraints.

This, and what Mike Hearn said about the crawler being more effective now. The crawler software was improved to only count nodes with 100% access and fully configured. It now looks at different parameters before it counts it as a full node. {If it's poorly configured and does not give full access, it will not be counted}

So there might be people out there, who have poorly configured nodes, and they do not even know it.

This should be addressed by the Bitcoin Core developers {Setting of default parameters, to automatically configure nodes to run at full capacity or minimum standards to be counted as a full node}

People just install the software and run the default options.  :(

AFAIK the way to measure the # of nodes has been changed along the way. The crawler is actually counting nodes accepting incoming connections on port 8333. Earlier version takes into account also all of them.

That said the increased burden in running a full node had definitely contributed to the trend.

Unfortunately we don't know how much effect the increase size of the  blocksize has had, due to the change  in the way we observed the nodes number.

I'm hearing this more and more.

It's also something that needs to be factored into the block size debate, as well as any incentives program.

Guys please help me out. What if 21 inc. starts to bring out it's embedded mining chips for smartphones, routers, and several other devices? To mine some dust of coins these devices have to run a full node client right? I mean this COULD mean an explosion of network nodes or how will they be able to mine otherwise?

This isn't correct. First of, I don't see the benefit in this. Anyone who mines with any of these devices would be doing so at a loss. Essentially the people that would mine like that are the ones that truly support the network.
You don't understand this correctly. There are 2 cases:
If you're solo mining, then you need the entire blockchain. If you don't have the last block yet, the network will most likely reject your mined blocks since you're already behind the chain.
If you're mining in a pool, then you don't need to download the blockchain. You just point your miner at a pool and start mining.

I hardly doubt that there is going to be enough storage in those devices to run full nodes as the blockchain is already at ~40GB.

Yeah, we weren't really going in the same direction with this. I was trying to point out that it wouldn't be usable with a very low number of nodes. However, I do agree with you as our conclusion seems to be the same.

As LaudaM already pointed out, those devices will not run a full node.
They'll be workers in a mining pool.
What that means is that somewhere at 21 inc they'll have one full node and all those little machines will share their computing power with that single node. Well, most probably more than one, but you get the idea.

Thanks for clearing things up. I wasn't sure how this will work that's why I asked.

By default, Bitcoin Core only allows 8 outgoing connections. To attain more than that, port 8333 must be open. However, you can still modify net.cpp line 57 and change the max connections. The best way to check is by going to https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ and check your connection by using the join the network.

Thanks for your answer. Of course I did not understand this correctly. That's why I askded!
But now I got it.

Incorrect. Download speed tends to decrease directly with distance. This means that if you are going to connect your Bitcoin core to a node at the other side of the world, the synchronization speed will not be as fast as choosing a slower but a node nearer to you. Netindex test the speed based on the best server to the test computer so it is fairly inaccurate if the test is conducted in a datacenter where both of the servers are at the same place. You shouldn’t look at the download speed but rather the upload speed since the node is uploading data to you.

The sole reason for pointing that out is because some people actually tend to read some posts and understand things wrongly. I guess question marks sometimes do not get noticed.

You're correct. Even though the ping gets noticed usually (gamers and such), the download speed goes down significantly. This is because in a TCP connection the data transfer is done in packets rather than a continuous stream. Each packet has to be acknowledged by the receiver, and this round trip takes time. Distant servers will require more hops, hence the decrease in throughput. As the number of hops increase the chances of packets dropping are also higher. This is going to further reduce the speed.

Gavin Andresen indicated that running nodes on a VPS was good solution.


“Most ordinary folks should NOT be running a full node. We need full nodes that are always on, have more than 8 connections (if you have only 8 then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution), and have a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet.

“So: if you've got an extra virtual machine with enough memory in a data center, then yes, please, run a full node.”

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1scd4z/im_running_a_full_node_and_so_should_you/cdw3lrh?context=3

I like the idea of using an incentivised VPS node program, but the diversity of VPSs around the world is the issue.

You would potentially have developing countries running millions of SPVs relaying data between western countries, which makes the system inefficient.

Bitcoin is fading out now... As in my city, there was news concerning bitcoin is a new investment and how GOOD it is. However there are very few news left for bitcoin, and all are about how people lost or scammed by bitcoin (which is inaccurate). As a result, less and less people are using bitcoin (and the price drops 80% from the all-time highest point). Also, the blockchain size grows from 10GB when I first heard of bitcoin, to about 35GB now (by blockchain.info). Not too much computers have 35GB of space for storing just a blockchain. Also newcomers are harder and harder to sync (because the blockchain size is big). So, there is a net decrease in the number of full nodes.

Spreading FUD are we? Why are you leaching money from DA DICE then? Everything in this post is wrong.
For the bolded part: FTFY. Your assumption is very wrong. Actually everything that you've said in this post is wrong. I don't even know where to begin.
1) The price wasn't realistic and anyone with any knowledge in economics should know this. The price was a bubble, it was caused by several factors including hype and the bot Willy. The realistic price for Bitcoin could be around $200 at the moment (since it was much stable than in the year before).
2) The blockchain isn't 35 GBs now, it is 40+.
3) Are you telling me that only a few people have HDDs over 120GB?  ::) In 2014 alone there have been roughly 560 million HDDs shipped. This means that about 540 Exabytes have been shipped, which is roughly 566 000 000 Terabytes. Not all of the shipments are for desktops, but the point should be obvious.
4) There are so many lightweight clients to choose from. Read: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet ;pruning is going to be implemented soon anyways.

I could go on, but this is enough. Bitcoin has just started scratching the surface of what is going to be.


Update: Slight corrections.

1. The price was stable at few cents at the beginning, will you say that the realistic price of bitcoin be few cents?
2. The data was get from blockchain.info (35,xxx MB), not myself. So if there is any error on the data, then it is blockchain.info's error, not my error.
3. At least my computer only having 39 GB of free space at C:\ drive, not enough for storing the 35 or 40 GB blockchain. Also the blockchain size is increasing drastically, making the size become bigger and bigger, finally not enough...
4. So I'm using blockchain.info wallet now!

as demand outstrips supply the price will grow and be stable at a even higher price then now.

Your first point is invalid again. It would only be valid if the number of users/investors/etc has remained the same since that price point (I'm not even going to mention supply). I don't use blockchain.info and neither should you. I have roughly ~3600 GB of free space and I come from a 3rd world country. What is your excuse?
You're obviously not familiar with the recent development. Pruning should have already been implemented however it was backported to 0.11 version of Bitcoin QT. A big blockchain will no longer be an excuse.

i think that is the mainreason here too.

you cant force people to run a fullnode when they just want to use bitcoin.

iam pretty confident that when we see the next  price-increase we will see also an increase in nodes. and there are also some nice hardware projects.


@el kaka22

just 39 GB of free drive space? you can buy 1000 GB for 60 Dollar  ::)

Sorry that I don't go to the Technical board too often. Also, how much does the 3600 GB hard disk cost? We are hard to find a C:\ drive having 4 TB space, and hard disks over 2 TB isn't popular at my place.
At my place buying a '1 TB' (about 931 GB exactly when seen on computer) costs a bit more than $100 USD. My home's computer is mainly used for useless purposes (such as playing with, doing casual works) and we don't need that much space. Also since we love to store things in DVDs instead of in the computer (because some data have lost in previous computer dead), and we have hundreds of DVDs, but not hard disks.

Just out of curiousity, where are you from?

Then you shouldn't have made a statement with false information if you ask me. There are no "popular" HDDs; people buy them according to their own needs.
A 4TB HDD isn't even [urlhttp://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Desktop-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST4000DM000/dp/B00B99JU4S/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1434806743&sr=8-2&keywords=4+TB+HDD]expensive[/url]. It can actually be found for only 130$.
People from the USA can't really complain as it should be cheap for them to run nodes.

I wouldn't recommend storing on so many discs. I don't see how a backup HDD (that isn't being used) would lose your data anytime soon.

Because my computer always out of order and hence the files inside it is lost. Besides, buying DVDs is cheaper than hard disks in my place ($0.05 per GB for DVDs and $0.12 per GB for hard disks). Since I'm not from USA and hard disks need to shipped to my place, extra costs will be there.I'm from a rural area in Asia so why all computer-related things are expensive.

6000 nodes is what I find to be a very low number, especially when it once was far over 300,000  :-\ I am happy to contribute with 2 full nodes.

Perhaps that a reward program can make things look completely different. For example, full nodes running longer than 2 weeks get 0.001BTC per 24 hours as compensation. (it's just an example) Only not sure how feasible this is.

Alt coins would have had an impact

So when 0.11 comes, how big will the blockchain be? Will it be optional to download the full blockchain vs a portion of the blockchain? Are there are any risks in using a slice of blockchain (pruning on) vs the entire downloaded one? Im just wondering what would happen if no one downloads the entire thing anymore.

That doesn't even make sense. At least the last part doesn't. Whoever doesn't download the whole blockchain can't be a full relay node. It is actually pretty clear that quite a portion of users are actually already using alternative wallets (I can't find a proper source right now). Besides, just running Bitcoin QT doesn't make you a node even though you download the whole blockchain.

Actually pruning was in consideration for quite some time now, however nobody has implemented it yet (it should be implemented in 0.11). It really just depends on how the developers implement it.
I think that they won't make the next QT download only a portion of blocks by default (last 288 blocks: source  (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/f9ec3f0fadb11ee9889af977e16915f5d6e01944)). You will probably have to change a setting or two that would enable pruning.

I don't know whether I could download just part of the blockchain only, but I will definitely use the bitcoin core if its size is less than 1 GB. However when everyone just download part of the blockchain then the previous block's data will be lost... So sharing the blockchain to different users is an opinion.

According to the OP's chart, the change happened between May 2013 and June 2015. Lightweight wallets were already fairly commonplace by 2013. For instance, Electrum and MultiBit - the two most popular lightweight wallets for desktops, as well as Blockchain.info - the most popular web wallet, were all released in 2011.

There is already an reward program which randomly chooses a user to give $10 USD to per week. This didn't help to increase nodes.

More importantly, who's going to fund this? There are 5809 nodes out there as of this post. You would have to pay 5.809 BTC per day for the nodes to have incentive. If it increases in the future, 10BTC or more would have to be used. If you take away transaction fees from miners, there wouldn't be any incentive for them to mine anymore when the block rewards decreases.

Again, this is baseless. People would still use multibit, electrum and other light weight clients.

Are you talking about this (https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/incentive/)? Maybe just a lot of people aren't aware of it, however it isn't much of a 'incentives' program since it rewards only a single random node from a group of 100. However, you're right. Even if they would pay out each node only $1 weekly, that's still a lot of money and you can't strip the miners from their money either.
A rise in the price isn't going to solve anything. Anyone running Bitcoin QT is not a node without port forwarding.

No , price is the key to solve everything

Let's image what will happen if the price reach 10k usd or more :

0. more than 100 million bitcoin users in the world .( if you deny this then ignore this reply )

1. people/companies will build large data center to store public ledger in different countries . Or even emit satellites  to store blockchain . As a result , blockchain size problem will be permanently solved .

2. bitcoin will be become the number 1 or 2 payment method in the world and also the important way to store value . people will reach a common sense for this .

3. traditional banks fall , bitcoin industry rise .

Once bitcoin plays a key role in our life , second or third layer protocol will be designed to overcome the technical obstacles (blockchain size , tx time etc ...) .

What a bunch of nonsense. Creating a bubble doesn't solve any problems.
Bubbles can occur in pretty much everywhere. Any rising stock attracts investors, although once the bubble starts to correct itself everything turns upside down. You've described a situation where people would only join Bitcoin to make more money and sell for fiat as soon as possible. Bitcoin doesn't need such people.

I'm not going to ignore your post, I'm going to put you on my ignore list.

only if it is a natural growth, and not manipulated, otherwise it will only fall back from where it come from, like it happened to 1200 peak

and we don't need another great bubble that burst after few weeks, again, because each of those bubbles will frighten newcomers, especially if the price is high enough like it was with the last one

Here is the probable and rational reasoning of node drop...

The drop in nodes is explainable by precisely ONE thing, which some tech deep developers appear to have little knowledge of:

Ease of use.

Users are running less full nodes simply because they don't have to. Wallets like Electrum and Mycelium are far lighter on system resources, and quicker to get started with. The same would be true if the block size was cut to 100KB. I could run a full node on my current system, but screw that. Even 5% of system CPU going to some background process is unwanted on my day-to-day machine. The same for even a paltry 5 GB of blockchain data which I could be using for cat pictures. Running the full client of a brand new copypaste altcoin is still irritating compared to using Electrum.

Businesses are also running less full nodes because THEY. DON'T. HAVE. TO. Which is quicker: figuring out how to install and configure a bitcoind, or just calling some blockchain.info javascript API or whatever? The latter, by a mile, for the majority of developers. Perhaps not for a Bitcoin Core dev, but most just want to make some cool app and aren't viewing everything through some ultra-decentralisation ideology.

The drop in nodes has nothing to do with block size: The full client has never been a lightweight piece of software, and the majority of people only used it because there was simply no alternative.
If anyone wants to actually understand Bitcoin's decentralisation, they might try making some kind of comparisons with the Tor network and number of relays or exit nodes and its usage. (Twice as old as Bitcoin, widely used, ~6000 relays which can be run by pretty much anyone, ~1000 exit nodes running one of which actually paints you as a target for law enforcement bother.)

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/383sbw/the_drop_in_full_nodes_is_explainable_by/

haha ... you reply only shows how short sighted you are

People/big money would not focus on bitcoin so much without 1200usd bubble  . bitcoin is money , It's all about money , not only blockchain tech .   

this is why perhaps POS/Peercoin may have an advantage.

Running a node costs less, so it could become much more distributed.

Eg as raspberry pi.

2000$ in peercoin guarantees hardware costs in about 2 years.

there is no such guarantee with asics infact quite the opposite.

Hello,

Are we taking into account the (SPV) Nodes? My first guess is all the bs government regulation has scared alot of people, and the simple fact that mining isn't profitable anymore has people going back to their day jobs. When BTC pops back over $800-$1000 they will all be running back saying we love bitcoin. Just watch and see.

It's an interesting idea as miners are able to merge mine as a reward, but it would take a change in the code, that said the units rewarded would not be Bitcoins but altcoins.
The alternative would be to add a proof of stake to the system as well as a mining element but at this point in time that type of forking proposal is unlikely, it could emerge though once circulation and mining rewards decrease a few forks in the future if their are concerns about a lack of incentivization to mine/ hold nodes.

You might be onto something. However, peercoin will never get to the place where Bitcoin is. The market cap was at a level similar to the one before the spike in 2013 just 2 months back. It might get another chance if we go into another bubble phase, but that's about it. One can usually find a few potentially useful features if we look at certain altcoins, however Bitcoin is what it is.
I guess running a node at home shouldn't be a problem for people who have unlimited bandwidth?

Proof of stake was an idea put forward by Gavin to Satoshi in order to solve the issue of people creating scripts and endlessly sending transactions to themselves at zero cost in fees or something along those lines.

Bitcoin has something built in that still does something along the lines of proof of stake. I'll have to hunt around for the reference.

Anyway.....there was a paper that said PoS coins needed to use a centralized reference node:  

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113791/neucoin-whitepaper-reveals-first-mathematically-watertight-proof-of-stake-currency

I would think killing GPU mining would have severely dropped the node count. I fear for all of these multi-million dollar farms out there that are literally going belly up as soon as the block reward drops again  ::)

I've been pondering the reward drop coming up.

One of the things that crossed my mind was this whole issue of block size increases. A reward halving would make transaction fees more attractive. But maybe that's one conspiracy theory too far.

Hey now... Bitcoin is all about a decentralized LIMITED currency. The reward halving is all in the name of keeping this currency stable. This isn't about making money. If people begin to increase transaction fees simply to make it more rewarding for miners losing out on this drop in reward... we're no better than VISA and very much against the fabric of why bitcoin was created. This will tell a lot. Bitcoin is either going to crumble or become more stable.

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this. Well I think that it is too late to introduce something as PoS. It is too late to change the fundamentals of Bitcoin.
There was also some talk about someone saying that it is inevitable to change the 21M supply. Changing something fundamental as that (block size is not part of this) would most likely kill Bitcoin.
Well yes, after we moved from CPU mining things have definitely changed. We need to figure out a solution for the nodes, so that they don't decrease to a number that might be deemed as dangerous (e.g. slow).

Issent just becasue the bitcoin core is too "heavy to run?
Most people has changed to multibit or electrum by now.
No point of running a full node when it takes so long to syncronize and the blockchain is many giga bytes.
I dumped bitcoin core long ago. Only using electrum now. Super fast and slick.

this because they have a shitty computer, you can sync in less than an hour with an ssd, evo is the best choice, anyone should buy one and not for bitcoin only

running a full node should be encouraged with a reward though, maybe not something in the line of a faucet reward...

THIS.

simply, there is lack of motivation to run full bitcoin node. you need SSD (because on HDD it consumes lot of I/O - at least in my case), open new port on firewall, update it time to time, it consumes lot of CPU/memory resources and bandwidth..and as a result is good feeling - which is obviously not enough anymore.

PS: and yes, I'm running full node for last 2 years..

Found a reference:

https://youtu.be/rQ3e1Pzu7iI?t=5m01s

That link is definitely PoW. No reward required  ;D

My only hope is that once pruning mode is enabled from 0.11+ we'll have people running nodes that only take 1GB of HDD space and hopefully the Bitcoin Core client doesn't take 15 minutes to open anymore.

If your client takes long to load, create a bitcoin.conf file[1] - if you dont have one already - add the following lines and modify (as in lower) the values as needed. Purning will most likely not change anything in that regard.



[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin#Sample_Bitcoin.conf

Not true. The moment your node connects to other nodes it will go though data agrement process with each of other nodes. Any node sending data that does not match your copy of blockchain will be IP banned for 24 hours. Nodes that agreed on blockchain will strengthen their view on what is correct data and will isolate node that is sending wrong data. All that happens in just few minutes after running Bitcoin-Qt and it makes no difference if connections to other nodes are outgoing or incoming. Also, other nodes can sync from your node even if your node is not accepting incoming connections. If your node is at block X and it connects to node (outgoing connection) which is at block X-500 the other node will start syncing from your node if no other node it is connected to provides data or they all provide wrong data.

The only real benefit of nodes that can accept incoming connections is improved decentralization. In the most extreme case, there would be just 1 such node and all others would connect to just that 1 node which would have ultimate control over traffic.

If you run the node just until it is synced then eventualy send coins but shut it down afterwards that would make traffic analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis) more complicated. Ideally, nodes should drop connections to all other nodes at some random intervals and not connect to same nodes again for yet another random interval. Also, transactions should be broadcasted and relayed to random number of other nodes. Situation where your node is on static IP and is connected to always the same other nodes is the worst possible one.

So if you open core to only check your balance every week or so, so basically 10 minutes of the wallet being opened per week.. you are still contributing to the network? because I never leave it opened as it takes way too much resources, when im done I close it again.

Yes, you are contributing to Bitcoin network.

I'm contributing to the network without any outgoing data? I hardly believe that. In the past 5 days (according to my own monitoring software) I've downloaded around ~900MB and uploaded ~2MB while syncing.
I didn't forward my port. There isn't really some benefit to the network.

It definitely does take a lot for it to start on default. As shorena mentioned one could manually edit some settings, however that's not the right way for things to be working for the average user. AFAIK as soon as we have 0.11 we should have pruning (unless it gets delayed again).

Download to upload ratio is of secondary importance.

You are only contributing to the network if you open port 8333 to allow relaying of transactions and blocks. Otherwise, it will just be downloading blocks from peer which does nothing

I believe the Core is sending some packets to the peers to get the blocks downloaded. You are only contributing to the network when you have >1 incoming connections.

It's crazy how the core got out of hand, and now all we can do is sit around and talk about it as bitcoin becomes less and less decentralized.

Exactly. It is just supplying the nodes with some information so that I can download the right blocks.
There was actually a discussion about this back in 2011 or 2012. Some claimed that it was partially useful, while some said it wasn't useful at all. In comparison to a full relay node, or miner it isn't that useful in my view. However, this doesn't diminish their contributions. Running Bitcoin Core for 10 minutes is pretty useless IMO.

A non-listening node contributes by relaying transactions, and also helps with security making sure that violations of the rules are ignored.

Most of the new users are using lightweight wallets like Mycelium oder Electrum. No more hassle with disc space and up/downstreams.

As far as I know and have observed using traffic analysis tools, non-listening node is a full member of the network. The only thing it can't do is sync up nodes that want to connect to it but again it can sync up nodes that it connects to. Run your node and use getrawmempool command at Console, you'll see unconfirmed transactions listed there. Node is collecting them for itself and to relay them to nodes that does not have some of those transactions in their own mempool, exactly what any sort of full node is doing. If your download and upload values are like 900MB and 2MB that just means your node is receiving new data slower than nodes it is connected to so other nodes are not often requesting such data from your node.

Each node on it's own is a clueless, it needs other nodes to create a consensus but it makes no difference if those other nodes will connect to your node or your node will connect to them so the whole story that non-listening, low upload nodes are less useful is false.

Also keep in mind bitnodes collected data can be easily skewed up or down. I know IP they are using so I can firewall it or I can create a hundred dummy full nodes that will all look like full nodes to outside observer.

Probably something to do with the PseudoNode Proxy (Fools Bitcoin Full Node Incentive Program)??

30GB blockchain is hard to download for simple users.
I used to run full node when it was 3GB.

I'd definitely love to set up a few servers and put up a few nodes,
but standard server HDD or SDD space doesn't cut it, since it's huge nowadays :/

What are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me that the standard server storage components do not have enough memory to store the blockchain?
Hopefully you're kidding because we have consumer grade storage components with 4 TB of memory or more. Currently the blockchain is ~41.8 GB big which isn't that huge today.

the problem was always the bandwidth, but it is actually the fact that some country are far behind in technology, so it is not really a fault of bitcoin here

also those same people who are whining about 30gb(not you, i'm talking in general) are the one that will download any game above 30gb on the first day of the release, via torrent...a bit ironic....

you can DL 30gb in less than 10 hours with 8mega connection, 8 mega should be available to everyone in 2015...

Well I do not think that the problem is the speed itself in some places. Syncing times have definitely improved since 0.10.x. However, there are places that have internet with low caps. Some people just can't afford to download the whole blockchain. However syncing takes more time because you have to verify each block (similar to the checkup when opening Bitcoin Core). Random lookups on mechanical disks aren't fast at all.
A stronger computer should be able to sync a bit more quickly.
However, this isn't going to be a problem for users anymore as we are going to have a pruning feature very soon.