Does anyone know? I'm currently using shared Internet services right now and am somewhat interested in mining as a hobby and was wondering how much bandwidth a full node actually uses.
thanks for linking my node
I would assume that it's not really a simple case of measuring the average size of blocks since a full node does much more than simply downloading blocks to add to its blockchain. A full node must also provide other nodes with a copy of the blockchain to download and they must also receive and relay transactions to other nodes too.
Does anyone know how much data is downloaded and uploaded? And would it depend on geography? If someone lives in an area where Bitcoin is highly popular and there are a lot of transactions going on around them, would their node experience more activity compared to someone who lives in the middle of Africa for example?
The physical location of your node should not matter. Every Node will get a transaction over time, if you get it early you send it to all other nodes connected. If you get it late you do not spread it further.
A transaction - or even a new block - is not the big factor though. In my experience the biggest impact is another full node syncing. My node typically hovers at 60-150 KiB/s upstream, but spikes way over 600 KiB/s from time to time. Usually only for a few hours at max. This happens when I run updates or when another node is connected for snycing. This impact will probably smaller as more and more nodes run 0.10.0 and can sync more efficiently from different nodes.
As you can see from the stats it never used more than 200 GB per month. Its connected @100Mbit/s and I limited the number of connections to 50. A higher connection speed and more connected nodes will probably result in more traffic. Maybe zvs can tell more about that as they run several full nodes and might have more insight on this.
