Hello, I'm a newbie with Bitcoin, but I'm a pretty savvy computer user (sysadmin-level).
I've set up a Bitcoin Gold node, and I'm able to run bitcoin-qt and its currently downloading the blockchain, and its showing about 26 hours left.
But I have a couple of questions that I'm still not sure of.
My bitcoin-qt is showing that I have 8 outbound connections, which are doing the work of downloading the blockchain. I seem to have connected to each of them on their port 8338.
I would have expected this to work in the reverse, where I can now see that my machine is capable of receiving inbound requests on port 8338.
I went to this page:
https://bitnodes.earn.com/#join-the-networkI put in my IP address and port 8338. It says "unreachable".
I've set up NAT forwarding on my router for 8338. When I go here:
http://canyouseeme.org/ I put in my IP address and 8338 is working.
So my question is: Will the bitcoin-qt process actually start listening correctly only once the full blockchain is downloaded? Or could I expect to see bitnodes.earn.com showing that my node is connected before then (as in, it should be working now)?
My other question is on the port. I've seen many examples / sites / comments where the default port for the bitcoin node is on port 8333, but mine is listening on 8338. Amazingly I haven't found a single piece of documentation that consistently shows the correct port. Some say 8333, some say 8338. Another couple pages shows 8833 (which I'm feeling is just a typo, but it was repeated on different sites).
What is the actual port supposed to be on? I'm feeling that the "correct" port is 8333, but my node came up by default on 8338, and I have outbound connections to other nodes on their port 8338, but no inbound connections. Is the 8338 just for Bitcoin Gold?
Thanks for the help!
