Bitcoin Forum

A *LOT* of technical people are not up with the nuances of peer-to-peer networking.
A *LOT* of savvy hard-money people do not have a clue about peer-to-peer networking.

These are typical Bitcoiners, and many of them download the reference client and fire it up thinking that they are helping the network. They know that as many people as possible running a full node is key to success for the network.

Yet, for many (most?) of them their router has port 8333 closed by default. Not doing as much as possible to help these full node users seems a real failing in the goal of maintaining decentralization.

Is there a reason why the reference client cannot perform a test on this port (after 1st peer handshake?), and have a pop-up and/or a clear message to advise the full node user that this needs attention? At present Core just sits there with a green tick regardless of whether the node is helping or leeching the network.

It might be obvious to developers that having just 8 connections indicates that port-forwarding is down, but not to many full node users.

http://www.lurkmore.com/mining/port8333/

Adding additional inbound reachable nodes to the network does not solve any problems we have currently. This isn't bittorrent: we're not trying to get more 'seeder capacity' or the like.

Nodes without inbound connectivity still help the network out in terms of partition resistance (more than inbound reachable ones, to some extent, because their inaccessiblity makes some DOS attacks harder to target) and block forwarding and transaction forwarding (which improves privacy somewhat for others too), but the most important thing a node does for the network is what it does for itself: it independalty verfies the information that comes in and won't accept invalid data -- no matter what, and users running (and _using_ their own nodes) is the exclusive mechensim to that directly provides any incentive alignment for miners at all.

Under no condition should you say that a node without inbound is "leaching". It isn't. It means they're not contributing socket capacity, but the total node count has fallen so far that we're nowhere near that limit either. (And if we were a few people would spin up a couple more high capacity nodes on a few hosting facilities and neatly address that.


It displays orange half-bars when there are <= 8 connections;  IIRC the green tick is signifying that it thinks its vaguely in-sync with the network.

It does automatically use UPNP where available, though considering that so many of the resource usage complaints (which result in people not running the software at all) are related to inbound usage-- it might well be that furthering the misconception that one has to setup port forwarding to matter at all would just reduce the userbase further.

Additionally, this problem goes away (or changes complexion alot) when IPv6 becomes the norm for most ISP's (it's mostly "western" countries' ISPs that are holding out).

yes and now.. but most home routers deployed by the provideres or bought by yourself (like a Fritz!Box), block all IPV6 traffic from internet to spezific hosts for security reasons.

You need to allow the traffic to the hosts.
And this is not a big difference to enable a portforward..

just by 2BTC

(running ipv6 only bitcoind since a long time :) but i noticed that i have more connections on the other bitcoind which run in .onion only then on the ipv6 only one :))