If this has been discussed elsewhere, feel free to link me - I didn't have any luck with my searches.
It's fairly straightforward to see the strength of the Bitcoin mining infrastructure growing by viewing the graphs of the relentlessly-increasing hashrate and thus mining difficulty. What I'd like to learn more about is the "health / strength" of the network with respect to the number of full nodes that are broadcasting transactions. I try to keep tabs on the number of full nodes via
http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/chart/nodes/ and have been disappointed by the recent decline, but I don't know if it is cause for concern.
Is there a method by which we can determine the optimal number / minimum threshold of operating full nodes that will keep the relaying of transactions robust?
