Bitcoin Forum

According to data analytics from Bitnodes, the number of Bitcoin Nodes globally is:

• more than 10,000 listening bitcoin nodes (nodes that allow incoming connections)
• 1833 of those nodes are in Germany and 1821 in USA with France a distant third at 549 while China has just 152 bitcoin nodes.
• Germany’s population is some four times lower than USA’s, while its economy is some five times smaller, yet it has managed to overtake USA

Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/09/11/germany-overtakes-usa-in-bitcoin-nodes



The previous numbers will not be accurate for several factors, and some nodes work through Tor, but what makes the number of nodes in Germany so large, even though a lot of the activity takes place in the United States.

Ah, yes! You just forgot one important point in your post. The why! Why is it a problem that a country runs so many nodes? No matter if it is Germany or another.

Besides, you have already anticipated a correct point. In Germany, there are also many TOR nodes relative to the population. So, many of the Bitcoin nodes might not even be from Germany.

You can't know which nodes run from Tor or how many there are. You can surely approach a number, but you can't be certain and know where they're located. Also, you don't send transactions to an exit node, but to an onion server instead. Even if the governments run exit nodes, they can't notice anything.

And what do they have to do with the nodes they run? It's irrelevant.

Node operation requires computer, network and other infrastructure. It will also be affected by local laws. I think this is the reason why China is backward. Germany's talent and economic level are world-class, and this result is very reasonable.

Or the larger cloud providers are located there so when people in other countries in the EU spin up something in the Amazon Cloud or in Azure even if they are located someplace else the node comes up with the IP of the data center which is there.

Also, the geo-location of IPs is fairly accurate but not perfect.
If you look at the IP of one of my home connections it's not even showing in the same stats.


-Dave

Perhaps Germany is really very active in bitcoin, whether trading, investing, there's a lot of store accepting bitcoin as well since 2018 if I"m not mistaken.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224741/firms-with-crypto-payment-solution-germany-city/

So they are very active and that's why many chooses to run a bitcoin node inside Germany. Maybe merchant themselves, or just ordinary bitcoin enthusiast.

I really can't see what the issue is here.  Germany loves bitcoin.

Is there any breakdown of which flavours of bitcoin or their offshoot/forks these are?  I'd also be interested to hear what proportion are using the Lightning Network for transactions.

If you compare Germany with the United States, regarding Bitcoin nodes when measured by blockchain network transactions and activities, Germany is certainly bigger than the United States, of course there is a reason for that.

From: crypto ownership data
Germany (https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-germany/), it can be concluded, that currently the largest crypto investors and investments are recorded in Germany, it is based on the survey data above, Germany is ranked first in the world today, compared to other countries such as the United States in second place and followed by Spain etc.

With that reason it can be said that germany currently has the largest Bitcoin node for now, compared to other countries.

Germany just loves bitcoin and wants to contribute to open-source community and to bitcoin particularly. Comparing the population, developers, bitcoin transactions to both country (US and Germany) is irrelevant for such matter, as not everyone who send/received bitcoin has a full node,  and it's hard to compare as there are no relevant data/statistics, just speculations.

From the numbers I'd say that it's US that has unexpectedly low number of Bitcoin nodes, not that Germany would have too many.
Maybe that's what should be researched.

There are never too many.

TOR nodes are not calculated for any country, they are classified as Unknown
https://bitnodes.io/nodes/?q=Tor%20network

The reason why Germany is so high is because of Hetzner who has 1210 nodes with 90% of them being located in Germany.
https://bitnodes.io/nodes/?q=Hetzner%20Online%20GmbH


Exactly, that's why this node count by country IP is simply useless.


I wonder how people will explain both Salvador and Nigeria having ZERO nodes  :D

LOL! However, I think that my point still stands. US has major cloud providers. US has history on its side (more early bitcoiners; may need better wording). US has the financial power - I don't really expect a Salvadoran invest into the hardware for a node, but an US citizen may even have that hardware sitting unused.

We're on the same page here, I just like making fun of all those articles who claim country x,y,z is the new El Bitcoinorado and the enthusiastic people there are on doing a, b and c but somehow manage to forget about running either a bitcoin node or an LN node.
Of course, nodes will be in places where people and businesses can afford to host one, that's why Africa has 16 nodes while Europe has thousands.

Also, just as funny as this, even the LN nodes that Salvador uses are also hosted in the US.  :D

Indeed. And for the individuals also the cost for the internet (and subsequently, the speed) may still matter.
In some countries now the things are cheaper and faster, but I don't expect that happen everywhere.



I would have been surprised to be different, really.

Yes, the numbers are biased and while they are good indicators to get an idea of where the nodes are the are not 100% reliable. In the case of Germany, it seems to have beens selected as a node hotspot but doesn't necessarily mean that the users are in Germany...

Still, it's an interesting location even for an artificial hotspot and can't even start guessing why that's the case

I saw it on Twitter yesterday but is it real?

I can not see how Germany has more Bitcoin nodes than the USA., yesterday and today. I use that website: https://bitaps.com/

Nodes with Tor is too small and can not help Germany takes over the USA. Or that website does not update stats real time? I don't think it is a dead website.

Do you know where is the website to check that news and nodes?

Even if these nodes weren't running from Azure's IP addresses, what would be the point of this “node count” anyway? What can you assume if you know that most of the nodes come directly from a specific continent? There's difference between the distribution of the hash rate and the nodes that are ran.

You should read the replies above. You can't know where they're located.

Hmm, nobody said a thing about the hashrate, so I don't know why you mentioned it but while the statics overall are indeed useless, in some cases the complete lack of data shows clearly there is nobody that keen on running a node in an entire country where according to polls and coindesk there are 80 million crypto users (https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/07/06/thriving-under-pressure-why-crypto-is-booming-in-nigeria-despite-the-banking-ban/).

As I said previously, it is indeed obvious countries with large hosting provides will have an unfair advantage here but if you look at the map and you see that every country in Europe, no matter how small still has a few nodes while half of the rest of the world is a desert is telling how much involvement really is there, and at this point one might start to wonder how easy it would be to launch an eclipse attack there against an already isolated node.

Starting a node is painful when your internet is garbage, as in my country where it takes months so sync. It can't be helped, it is what it is. From that you can also guess the amount of people here using core...

There is no such a thing as "too many" nodes in a country, there is however a lack of nodes in too many places.

Rather than anything else I would say it is a power and technology availability issue. Germany is quite a wealthy country and has always naturally gravitated towards efficiency, the blockchain seems like a perfect match for that mindset. They have the cash to buy up lots of hardware that can be used to host these nodes, they have a fairly reliable infrastructure that can keep them safe, a solid legal system and they have a reliable fairly cheap source of energy. Since China has dropped off the radar, you just know that other nations were going to step in to the gap that was left behind - most likely a lot of the servers were actually shipped from China to Germany for all the reasons stated.

This is based on restrictions not just about the economy size or capability. If a country give more privilege to but doing mining and operation then more activities will come in because more investors that are planning on mining will go to the country and build there mining nodes for work to commence. Since America support Bitcoin but does not give it full activities based of task added service then mining operation will be lesser.

You should keep in mind that the listening nodes represent a small percentage of the entire bitcoin nodes (between 5% to 15%) and when you see counts per IP or any other metric, they are only considering these nodes not all bitcoin nodes.
The reality is that majority of bitcoin nodes run by individuals don't listen to incoming connections so these statistics don't cover them. But almost any node hosted on a cloud (mostly located in Europe) do listen and are included in statistics.

Because of the argument that Bitcoin is centralized due to the China's miners. Some folks will state this by adding that Chinese own the majority of the hash rate and since China is an authoritarian nation, their government rules those those who own the majority. While this isn't correct to conclude, they say their government essentially owns it.

It doesn't have to do with the thread, I just mentioned it, because the nodes' distribution isn't even such thing. It doesn't matter if all the nodes run in the USA, China or Germany. Running a node is more like a personal procedure in which you're having much more benefits than the network.

The logic is simple, assuming that both countries have shite internet connections - and this is to say nothing about connection downtimes - downloading a third of a TB in these countries, on your private home connection (because let's face it, do you really think you'll be allowed to host a node on academic faculty hardware?) will take simply too long, and the amount of GB that's passed around in the form of block messages that will follow makes the IDB unfeasible even if you stretch it across several weeks, you're node will always be dozens of blocks behind the tip.


...there is such a thing as too many nodes in a particular ASN. e.g. an entire data center burns down or otherwise has an outage, and dozens of nodes go down with it.

Side note, but I just checked one of our clients that has offices here in NY, NV, and elsewhere in the US.

The parent company is in Canada. All of their internet here in the US comes from either local providers. Cable, Verizon, etc.
Every office has it's own local ISP, but the parent company pays the bills. So if you look up 3 of the 5 offices IP space here in the US, in any of the popular geo location databases they show as the parent company in Canada.

Never actually thought about it till this thread which made me go look.....

-Dave

One reason can be having many could service and service providers in their country and quality of the services and connection can be another reason, Germany is providing service to the users of the other countries., So running more nodes there can be not surprising, there are also some other counties having strong and stable network and cloud providers but because Germany showed before that they do not have an unstable government to ban bitcoin one day and make everyone shocked running nodes there can be safer.

Does anyone actually have an evaluation of whether these are Bitcoin full nodes only or whether the number also include lightening nodes?
I ask because recently a few German youtubers with a larger reach have called for setting up lightening nodes. The current numbers could therefore be the result of this.