Bitcoin Forum

Bandwith used by Bitcoin is almost irelevant right? Super low?

I could be wrong here but to me it seems bitcoin doesn't need much bandwith at all. Basically like sending a medium sized text file every few minutes bandwith wise.

I'm just wondering if I up my mining considerably if I'll need to upgrade my connection at some point.

Obviously 4 or 8 5970s isn't a problem but if you've got say 100+ going at it or you're doing 50ghash/s are you going to be burning up bandwith or is the consumption that super low?

Obviously if you can afford 100+ high end GPU's and the hardware then you can afford some more internet.

Currently it is quite low, and I guess it'll remain like that for a while. But one day it might require more bandwidth than average home users have.

Mining consumes very little bandwidth.

Running a bitcoin P2P node consumes a noticeable amount of bandwidth -- my VPS ran out of its 1000GB allocation this month.

Ok tried to get info on the node on my own, I failed going to admit to being the newb here.

I know the general meaning of "node" but I'm not sure how it ties in to P2P and bitcoins.
I understand how mining works you just completely lost me on node.

Is that something I'd want to do, what are the benefits / costs etc?
If it generally goes by another name and I can research it on my own I'll save you some time if you tell me what to look in to.

Thanks.

Do you have an idea what part of the protocol munched up most of the bandwidth? It's a definite concern for people who want to run seed nodes to stabilize the network, as well as people interested in a mobile client.

If I had to guess, would it be exchanging/downloading the block chain?

Wow, do you mean your bitcoin client communicated a terabyte in a month??? That doesn't sound right.

Average block size is about 3.5 kB, that makes about 15 MB/month. If you had 100 peers that could be maybe 2 GB/month.

Relaying blocks, relaying TX's, and a lot of initial-block-downloads, I suspect.  I don't have hard data besides "bitcoind was the only thing running on that VPS."

The block file is 90MB. So you'd have to do 11,000 initial block downloads.

This server averages 80-100 connections normally.  I modded the outbound limit, it's not behind a NAT, and it advertises itself on IRC.

So it is designed to be popular.  But 360 block chain downloads per day?  I have no idea if that is realistic or not for this server.