Bitcoin Forum

Hello all,

I'm a software engineer who has spent much of this year trying to gain a better understanding of Bitcoin's network of nodes and I'm now at the point where I could use feedback and support from the community.

My journey began when I asked the question: How many Bitcoin nodes is enough? (https://medium.com/@lopp/bitcoin-nodes-how-many-is-enough-9b8e8f6fd2cf) Many people were worried about the declining number of nodes, myself included, but I wanted to prove or dispel those worries with hard numbers.

To help answer this question I created the Statoshi fork (https://jlopp.github.io/statoshi/) of Bitcoin Core and began digging deeper (https://medium.com/@lopp/peeking-under-the-hood-of-a-running-bitcoin-node-784870874515) into the messages being passed around between nodes.

After a few months I felt that Statoshi was ready for node enthusiasts to run on their own and released the project (https://medium.com/@lopp/announcing-statoshi-realtime-bitcoin-node-statistics-61457f07ee87). The setup process is fairly complicated due to all of the software dependencies, but I hope to make this process much easier by eventually releasing Docker containers that will handle the dependencies automatically.

Because I want these statistics to be readily available to the public without requiring installation of Statoshi, I built a public dashboard (https://medium.com/@lopp/announcing-statoshi-info-5c377997b30c) that is easier to use. You can find it at http://statoshi.info (http://statoshi.info)

After monitoring the network for 6 months, I posted my findings (https://medium.com/@lopp/the-state-of-the-bitcoin-network-2b6911fd9e32) regarding the health of the node network. Long story short, the network is healthy but we always desire more nodes to make it more robust and decentralized.

I have plenty of ideas for the future direction of this project, some of which I outlined in this post (https://medium.com/@lopp/the-future-of-statoshi-f6ff9afb4f85).

If you're interested in this project, I would appreciate your help. Potential ways you could contribute:

• Post ideas for new stats / charts / features, either on here or by creating an issue on Github (https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi/issues).
• Submit pull requests for new stats collection to the Github project (https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi/).
• Play around with building custom charts on statoshi.info to see if you can find any interesting correlations. If you're unfamiliar with Grafana you can watch some how-to screencasts here (http://grafana.org/docs/screencasts/). If you build a chart that may be useful for the community you can save it as a JSON payload and send it to me to store permanently.
• Donations to my 1STAToshi (https://blockchain.info/address/1STAToshiScchY69P37xouKEJgi5G1rsf) address will only be used to pay for server costs; my current costs are $40 / month for the statoshi.info server
• If you have high bandwidth servers that you'd be willing to donate toward running a fleet of managed Statoshi nodes, that would be greatly appreciated.

Anyone who wishes to contact me off-forum can find me through https://onename.io/lopp (https://onename.io/lopp)

We need more nodes to keep the network safe.