In these times when nearly all indicators are pointing towards increasing adoption and growing economy of Bitcoin there is one important (??) indicator pointing down: The number of connected hosts.
According to
http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/ there are now less than 3000 listening hosts. I guess these are mostly people running Bitcoin-qt and with port 8333 open - mainly miners.
I do not think that this development is surprising: Most regular Bitcoin users are migrating to lightweight clients and mobile clients and only miners really need to remain well connected to the backbone p2p network.
In the beginning of Bitcoin -
anyone with a CPU could mine (one CPU - one vote) -
soon, only people with a GPU could mine (ruling out laptops) -
then, only people with certain ATI GPUs could mine (ruling out Nvidia and on-board graphics) -
today, only people with ATI GPUs AND cheap electricity or FPGAs could mine (ruling out many people who own even good ATI GPUs)
in the near future, only people with an expensive 28 nm FPGA can mine (even fewer people) -
within a year or so, only people with a dedicated ASIC (costing $1000+) can mine (even fewer people).
The thing is that while that the raw hashing power needed to attack the network is growing, the number of miners you need to target by DDOS or otherwise (if you are a malign government wanting to take down Bitcoin) is getting lower by the day!
IMO the 3000 nodes that we currently have seems like an easier target for a well funded attacker than than the prospect of deploying 55,000+ spartan 6 chips to brute-force a 51% attack.
What do you think? Is the chronic decline in hosts a genuine problem for the backbone p2p network?
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