Bitcoin Forum

Howdy! Been running core node for awhile, and finally noticed that there are terabytes of data to exchange. I wondered if I might be contacted by my ISP because of it, so wanted to ask if anyone else has had any problems with a local provider and their amount of data usage. Thanks!

I do not think lack of privacy has gotten up to this. There are businesses that uses huge amount of data and the network provider will not contact them.

I used almost 2.5 terabyte last year and no no one called me and asked me the reason I used 2.5 terabyte data.

All you need is to use Tor while running your own node and no problem to your privacy regarding this.

Yeah, not worried about the 'privacy' thing, I just wondered about the data usage end. You say you used 2.5tb last year? My node shows almost 2tb over the last week or so! That just seems excessive for some of these smaller isp's. I guess I'll just have to stay tuned. Thanks!

Do you mean upload data? You can limit it with this command line option:
This is my setting (half a TB per day max), and there wasn't nearly enough demand to even get close to that.

That completely depends on your ISP. You could ask them about their Fair Use Policy.

Here it's not even metered (or at least my ISP doesn't show me). My own laptop uses slightly more than you do, and all other devices add to that. Video streaming also takes a lot of bandwidth.
They may have other restrictions for upload data, although all this sounds like a thing from the past.

How did that happen? Mine, running on a high bandwidth server, uploaded only 2 TB per month. That made me believe there's plenty of nodes providing upload bandwidth.
Could it be you're in a location where not many people upload? Is that still a thing? 2 TB is enough to get 3 new nodes through the IBD.

Well, I’m not sure on that. I have 115 inbounds and 10 outbounds, and the Network window stays spiked with a constant data transfer in/out.

ETA: Is the data sent/received totals on the Network page since installation, or is it reset each time it’s stopped/started?

I thought the default would be 10, but it's indeed 125 connections.

At your home PC? Isn't that slowing down your own internet?

No slow down, but I'm on a 1gb fiber connection. Even on a VPN, with the node up and running, I still get 850/300 average speed overall.

Did you check for any malware on your device which can be one of the reasons why so much data is transacted if you sure that your Bitcoin node is not taking up all the resources?

As you said you are running on default settings which lets you connect with 125 peers so if you want to limit the data usage you can follow
Loycev's suggestion of . Use -maxuploadtarget=<MiB per day>

Other options are Disable "listening" (-listen=0) and (-maxconnections=<num>) which will let you to connect with lesser nodes so less data consumption.

I am using unlimited data connection and my ISP never cared about how much data I use so that's not much of a concern in my opinion.

No malware, run a tight ship, Bitdefender and observe all security practices. I’ll just forget about it unless and until my isp says otherwise. Thanks!

Well, mate. There’s a simple solution here. Reach out before they do.

Go check whether they have a specific data caps you can’t exceed. Exceeding their data usage may give you some unwanted fees besides a call and a question for suspiciously high data usage. It might also be possible that they have better services that they could offer to you considering how much data you use.

Right, 125 if it can "listen".
Still correct otherwise, since you'll only see 10 (max of 11 for a short while) if your node cant establish inbound connections.

In "Network Traffic" window?
It resets in every restart, that's the total for the current session only.

You could do google search or ask them about fair or acceptable usage policy set by your ISP and internet package you use. Even if your internet package is unlimited, few ISP might ask you to reduce overall internet usage.


I don't he need to worry about malware since he said he got 2TB number from his node.

Malware is not going to make 2TB of incoming/outgoing traffic unless it is one to make you run an open proxy or a DDoS attack, both of which are easily noticeable because you can see your normal traffic considerably slow down.

Most malware is only interested in creating a backdoor to your computer, and make it talk to a command and control (C2) server so that it can exfilterate information and keystrokes.

You should probably stop using wind0ws os and antivirus bloatware software like bitdefender, you won't have any viruses or malware with linux and there won't be any hidden uploads.
It's also better to have separate computer device for Bitcoin nodes, this can even be old laptop, or low power devices like Intel NAC.
 
 

Cool. So, my node shows it connected 2 days ago. In those, 2 days, it shows data as follows:

Received: 4GB
Sent:       2126GB

So about 1 TB daily. Is this amount of data exchange not normal? Why would mine be higher? What are some of your data amounts?

Why is it like pulling teeth around here to get any answers?! I’m genuinely interested in this and want to learn!

ETA: well, I missed that the startup time is listed on the Information tab of Core. It shows........ Fri Jun 14 16:01:40 2024, which is weird because my longest connected peer shows only 2 days. So not sure what that's about.

It's normal though, peers usually disconnect/banned due to some factors like manually shutdown by the node owner, bad connection, misbehaving, etc.

Yes, the time in the 'Information' window is the actual start-up time,
The same timestamp that you can see in the "debug.log" file (in UTC time), your active session starts at the last "Bitcoin Core version" line.

Yes, thanks. I hadn’t thought about how often some peers connect/disconnect often. So that wouldn’t be so much data over a week’s time.

Now………. can you do anything about the current price slide?! lol

I uploaded only 2 TB per month. It makes me curious why your node is so "popular" to download from.

Does that mean it's "only" 1 TB in 3 days?

I think it's a lot, but that also means you're helping quite a lot of people in syncing their node. So if your ISP doesn't mind, keep doing it :)

Yes, the data flow is less than I thought, that 2TB was over a week’s time. Much better! And yes, I’m privileged to be able to run a node and help with this new technology. Thanks all for the help!

Where are you from? In my country, warez and torrent websites are popular since I remember. Almost the whole population has been downloading and uploading movies, games, software and other staff on different local warez websites (not now though) and no one ever had the problem. There were many admins of warez websites that were uploading terabytes of data every week and no one had the problem.

Btw running a Bitcoin node is legal, you won't have any issue, so it's perfectly legal to exchange that much of data. ISP's don't limit you on how much data you can upload and download. What if you and the whole family stream 4K videos all the time while downloading games from PlayStation, EA and Ubisoft? Users like you shouldn't be many. If anything, they'll contact you and max that they can do is to set you a limit.
I personally never had a problem with the usage of huge data and I often download Blu-Ray movies and tv-series.

This node is in the middle of nowhere in a wheat field, 50 miles east of Little Rock, AR.

Maybe there's a large demand to update other Bitcoin nodes in your field :D

Seriously though: I don't know how much distance matters for Bitcoin Core downloads.

Ya, distance doesn’t matter. I’ve got Internet lol someone asked where I was located. Small farming community, population of 12K or so, small ISP.

Individual nodes are somewhat, well, individual. Your internet connection has quite some bandwidth and apparently a lot of other nodes connected to yours benefit from your high outgoing capacity. You have a lot of bandwidth to offer and nodes that connect to yours demand a lot of block data from your node.

As you don't limit the upload target, you serve suprisingly high amount of data from your node. If you want to put a daily limit on your upload target, instructions have been provided here already for that.

If you're concerned what your ISP might have to say about this, if they care at all, look into your contract you signed. Does it say anything about data volume, fair use, whatever?

My internet connection is considerably different from yours. Incoming bandwidth is a stable ~110Mbit and outgoing bandwidth around ~40Mbit, that's about a tenth of yours if not even less than that as I'm not using VPNs.

I run 4 nodes for specific reasons concurrently on Mainnet. I will give you the daily average based on uptime of my node's Bitcoin Core daemon and the output of bitcoin-cli getnettotals.
I use larger mempools than default, fwiw.

Yes, thanks for that. I had gotten a little freaked out when I saw the data transfer, but after this thread, and looking deeper, it is not near as bad as I thought. I think it will be okay as far as my ISP.

But yeah, I knew I had a good local machine here and the bandwidth to hook up to the network. I no longer ‘trade’ $Bitcoin, just accumulate. So I’m more than happy to help on the decentralization of it. The more the merrier, ‘eh?!

Reminds me of the old days of Distributed Computing lol. Crunched a lot of numbers and folded many a protein back then!

Distance doesn't matter, but network type (IPv4, IPv6, Tor or I2P) and IP address range matters. See https://bitcoincore.reviews/16702 (https://bitcoincore.reviews/16702). I would speculate there aren't many other full node on OP's IP range.