Bitcoin Forum

Of the 5,300 full nodes listed on Bitnodes (https://bitnodes.21.co/) or Coindance (https://coin.dance/nodes), just how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?

In other words, how many ordinary individuals or ordinary businesses who are not focused on Bitcoin development run nodes - the ordinary folk on the street?

For example,

* BTCC  (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-giant-btcc-donates-100-full-nodes-help-maintain-network-1534926)has around 100-120 Bitcoin nodes
* There are well over 100 Bitcoin developers, so another 100 full nodes
* There are firms like Tradeblock, Chainalysis and Ellipitic who between them need lots of nodes to do analysis, so probably another 200 between them (if not much more)

So in just this small sample we have something approaching 10%.

Why does this matter? Well, it goes towards the centralization argument. All these firms and arguably most of the individuals can be censored and controlled by targeted governmental actions. So we need to know and not just sweep this issue under the rug.

developers: sure
individuals interested in bitcoin and contributing to the network: sure
businesses like mining pools, exchanges, gambling sites, mixers: sure
other businesses: No. because all of them tend to use services that come in the middle and make things easier and safer for them.
for example Steam that started accepting bitcoin, they go through bitpay. there are many other big businesses that do the same, so none of them run full nodes.

and also because of the anonymity of bitcoin and Nodes that you only know their IP there is no way anyone can give the right answer to this question. unless you go around finding every single IP address and find out if it is a real IP (not VPN,...) and who owns it which is not possible.

It's impossible to reach a mildly correct conclusion for this question... We can maybe study the network and see what nodes have similar IP's and which of these IP's are known people, but this still doesn't give us much information (or information that is precise). There's no other way I can think of at the moment to study this.

I assume the correct % is on the lower end. Highly doubt it goes beyond 10%, but this is just me speculating. As said, many companies go through payment gateways, so I assume only companies that run exchanges, pools and online wallets have their own nodes.

From all this I think we can conclude we have more to worry about regarding centralization in what concerns hashpower per region. Having a lot of hashrate in China is more likely to be a danger than the distribution and number of companies running nodes (or not running them).

when asking a question about how many use fullnodes. the question seems to not be right.
by asking how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?
it will be the majority. because your literally covering the majority of use-cases within the question

it would be better to have maybe 3 different polls

businesses
individual devs
individual users

or even as more specific questions.
how many CLUSTERS of nodes are run by a single business/individual (minimal sybil)

Well, feel free to provide an opinion on your offered list

You can add another 189 nodes ran by blockchain.info https://blockchain.info/connected-nodes

Not only business i think many tech lovers and home based miners also tend to run full node just for fun or to remain in safe side and store their bitcoin out of web wallets.
Actually running full node doesn't cost much because of cheaper diskspace and internet bandwidth so anybody who like to run and support bitcoin can run it with just few clicks.

Also few local merchants and small local bitcoin exchanger/trading platforms tend to run few nodes for secure operation. Many small bitcoin based companies and startups are popping up in every corner of the world, they will also atleast run few nodes for sure, so i don't think we have to worry about centralization of bitcoin network.

https://bitnodes.21.co/
I think majority of this nodes are hosted over VPS, because most of the VPS provider offer US based servers.

The basic starting point was that every user = a full node.

With the advent of pools, full nodes stopped being needed for mining.

there are over 300,000 merchants that accept bitcoin. but only ~5400 nodes (most are using middle men.)
making the business to node %/ratio small
there are only a few thousand 'dev's' but ~5400 nodes.
making the devs to node %/ratio LARGE

though we cannot easily know exactly who is running what. it is atleast fair/logical to say that most businesses are not running nodes. and most devs are. although some businesses. single devs may be running more then one node per entity

you sometimes run into criticism, but from my point of view your contributions are incredibly insightful and helpful.

thanks!

Not to be too critical my friend, but we cannot assume that Bitcoin merchants will be running nodes. Most merchants/businesses in third world

countries will not run nodes due to the additional bandwidth and infrastructure needed to run a node. The bandwidth is very expensive in the

third world countries and these guys will do most tx's via payment processors, because most of them convert Bitcoin to Fiat almost

immediately after they receive the bitcoins. We run several nodes from satellite sites to distribute the bandwidth burden and for redundancy. 

i run a bitcoin unlimited node in order to show them some support but everyone who has a non trivial amount
of bitcoins should run a node to protect the network and help prevent centralisation .........

i also like to do my bit to help others in my area who may neeed to download the chain from me

In my experience very few businesses are running full nodes; instead they mostly rely on third party APIs.

Many developers do not run nodes which are reachable to the outside world-- uses a lot of bandwidth.

Most miners use pools and do not run a full node at all.

my node uploads about 700MB a day .... i wouldnt call that a lot of bandwidth

i was under the imprerssion that x-thin and compact blocks are fairly economic to run
in modern clients ?

It would only be a guess on my part to say how many nodes are run by businesses, i know for sure tho that i am just a man on the street who is running a full node 24/7.  i cant understand why everyone else is not.  ???

It's not possible to see what node is being run by what person or entity, so we can only guesstimate. You can add in all the bitcoin experts and people that talk about it all the time like Andreas A or Trace Mayer or all those guys, they all run nodes, they all want to activate segwit as soon as possible so thats 0.13.1 nodes.

You make Bitcoin what it is.

Good for you.

It sounds like we have a little more decentralisation than I thought going into this.  Just too few full nodes, perhaps.

 i would say quite a lot of people are running a full client but they forget to open port 8333 on the router to allow incoming connections so they are basically leeeching from the network without giving back
there should be a popup warning in the client as most people probably have no idea and may think theyre runnning a node when they arent ....   
this applies whether your running core or bitcoin unlimited client,get that

kinda agree with you, but, to me, the whole decentralization argument is about being able to run your node...
even if some nodes can be censored, i doubt it would be the majority.

You probably aren't accepting inbound connections, or are potentially in a /16 with many other nodes so you are connected to less often.   About 300GB/month transfer is not atypical for a node with inbound connections.

BIP152 reduces the data used to send blocks, but that data was only about 12% of the overall (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377345.0).

actually i am accepting inbound connections on port 8333,running the node with 30 -80 connections
and i dont use BIP152 (i keep default bitcoin unlimited settings )

not sure why the upload bandwidth isnt higher but it seem to run fairly efficient as is

I think there are maybe a few portions of the entire node network that are run by businesses, but for a lot of them it doesn't make sense for them to do such a thing because it's just an energy sink for the most part, unless I'm woefully uneducated when it comes to the pros and cons of running a node.

I know Greg is stalking me on this thread ( :D), but while I do want to know how many ordinary users are out there running full node and can't be easily caught up in some coordinated take down by governments, most likely through some weird legislation, I am also interested in how businesses can expand their use of full nodes and still have the benefit of SPVs.

As I provide enterprise level services and support on a couple of apps, I know users just want to be users (as Satoshi put it). Quite a lot of my customers are looking at moving to the cloud, a fair number going to Azure.

So I have also been doing some research on enabling businesses to run full nodes and linking them to SPVs. As it turns out, Jonas Schnelli with the help of Mr. Maxwell (hence my stalking jest) has been doing some work on encryption between SPVs and full nodes (BIP150 and 151). For the past year, I was thinking about something similar but coming at it from a business and noob user point of view, using something like (as it turns out) BIP 150 / 151 to launch a secure full node by simply running a particular type of commercial grade SPV (it would have fees and therefore SLA's).

So on a number of issues, this thread is very helpful.

so you want to run a cluster of full nodes so that litenode users can have what you deem as a whitelist of trustable full nodes the litenodes connect to.

like a next gen multibit. by just removing random node connection and replacing it with whitelist cluster of fullnodes.
interesting. but as soon as you put a pricetag on it.. you'll start to see alot of community resentment and lack of desire for it.

for instance multibit is free. but the number of users using it is limited so expect maybe 20x less people using a paid for service compared to a free service of similar concept.

i think your concept would only work if its not just a litenode. but does lots of other fancy things not found in any 'free' lite/web/full node available today.

im not sure what niche that can be(im sure your going to integrate your 'enterprise level services and support on a couple of apps'). whatever that may be.. so i hope you add in some services/features not available elsewhere.. or it wont take off.

simply reinventing multibit but with a usage charge wont really take off, lets hope thats not all your conception is

You are right and (hopefully) wrong.

People that want free, well they can use one of the many free wallets out there.

What I see all day every day is the need for support. Businesses run things, but when they go wrong, they don't want their staff to be on google trying to find answers. They need: call this number > get a ticket > get a resolution > close ticket.

What you also have to do is take a look at the world from outside the day to day Bitcoin bubble.

You would have no trouble running an SPV with a full node attached, with encryption enabled. Would an ordinary worker at a utility company have that level of skill? And why should they have to learn it? They are there to do a job at the company they work for, and they are expert at that job. They don't want to have to become expert at running something their employer wants them to use.

And think about running full nodes from an enterprise point of view. An organisation of 1,000 people decides they want to run Bitcoin and they need 200 full nodes. That, like it or not, will slow down their already congested networks. Bitcoin wouldn't last a week once deployed on production environment. Scale that up to 100,000 strong business needing 1,000 full nodes and you can pretty much hear the CTO laughing you out the door.

since you mentioned multibit, i'd like to add a little bit of history regarding this.

Multibit was free, and some day the developers decided to release a new version and add a little bit of fee to this new version called Multibit HD and that fee was going to the developers. this little feature was called BRIT
this caused lots of resentment and eventually people stopped using Multibit HD and either switched to classic or Electrum and other wallets.

the developers finally gave up on that (IMO stupid) idea and removed it in version 0.3.0 eventually.

The financial investment should be compared to complex "Point of Sale" and data archiving for the finance division of the company. Most of these

companies will only run a few nodes to support decentralization {out of principle, if they understand the importance} but the rest would be API's.

Previously many of these companies dumped millions into complex mainframes & networks, so this should not be a real issue. I know our IT

guys are running a few nodes, just to experiment and to learn about the technology.  ::) ... The rest are hosted by the Finance division.

 

What kind of company do you envisage using 200  full nodes per 1k staff??
Also a node that's fully synced uses so  little resources and bandwidth that it can run in the background of a standard desktop and you would be unaware its even running so I don't know how it would "bog down their already conjested networks"

Why is their network already conjested anyway?