Anywhere I can get old historical data on the number of nodes?

[alani123]

So I know that bitnodes has been monitoring the network for quite some time, however their website only displays data from the last 365 days. Any way to look at older data?

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[alani123]

Bump! Please don't make me turn to Reddit for help.

[Xialla]

I spent some time searching with google etc and all is redirecting to source you posted above. it really seems, that there is no other source..

[alani123]

So, I had an email interaction with Addy Yeow from getaddr.bitnodes.io. He promptly replied to an email I sent essentially asking the same question as in the OP. Short story short, stats from early December 2013 weren't that accurate. Old snapshots are no longer available. A more efficient crawler was released in late December 2013. Right now, snapshots from June 2014 is the oldest data kept, hence the 365-day chart.

I shall thank Addy for his response and awesome work in general. If you'd like to donate you can find his address here.

[alani123]

Also, slightly off topic but few days ago Peter Todd cited an image with stats on full nodes to point out how significant their decline is.


Image he linked


Given that the old stats of weren't valid, the decline probably isn't as dramatic. Unless of course Peter Todd is using and is citing another crawler that was monitoring the network since 2013 and was able to deliver accurate statistics from day 1.

[redhack]

Isn't every Bitcoin Core is also a full node?

[LiteCoinGuy]

in the old days everybody HAS TO run a full node, so it is logical that there were thousands of them! just keep that in mind. of course today everybody runs a lite client.


@redhack

no.

[RealBitcoin]

in the old days everybody HAS TO run a full node, so it is logical that there were thousands of them! just keep that in mind. of course today everybody runs a lite client.


@redhack

no.

I do run a full node, but only update it occasionally, so thats probably not that significant.

Also isnt this a concern that less and less nodes are available? You have to trust the noders more and more...

[Bizmark13]

So I know that bitnodes has been monitoring the network for quite some time, however their website only displays data from the last 365 days. Any way to look at older data?

I know it's been discovered that the old stats weren't valid but if you're still interested in seeing what the site looked like back in 2013, you could try browsing the archives at the Internet Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

The earliest snapshot is from June 2013 and shows that there were 470,000 nodes at the time (again, this was from back when the stats weren't valid):

http://web.archive.org/web/20130609095243/http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

If Bitnodes only started showing accurate stats from late December 2013 onwards, then this snapshot from February 2014 is probably the earliest accurate one:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140223062642/http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

[alani123]

in the old days everybody HAS TO run a full node, so it is logical that there were thousands of them! just keep that in mind. of course today everybody runs a lite client.

I don't think that's entirely true. While the mainstream bitcoin client that's know known as bitcoin core was and still is the most trusted wallet, alternatives existed even from the early days. Not everyone that wanted to use bitcoin needed to run a full node even in the old days.

[Bizmark13]

in the old days everybody HAS TO run a full node, so it is logical that there were thousands of them! just keep that in mind. of course today everybody runs a lite client.

I don't think that's entirely true. While the mainstream bitcoin client that's know known as bitcoin core was and still is the most trusted wallet, alternatives existed even from the early days. Not everyone that wanted to use bitcoin needed to run a full node even in the old days.

It also depends on what is meant by "old days". For example, I first got into Bitcoin back in mid-2011 and back then, there were no lightweight wallet options that I was aware of. I remember trying to sync the blockchain over my crappy college Internet and giving up because it took too long. Perhaps if there were lightweight wallets back then, I would have paid more attention to Bitcoin and its future potential.

Both Electrum and MultiBit are the most popular lightweight wallets for PC right now and both were released in late 2011. Same with Blockchain.info which is currently the most popular online wallet. That one was released in August 2011. Mycelium's mobile wallet was released in late 2013.

[alani123]

in the old days everybody HAS TO run a full node, so it is logical that there were thousands of them! just keep that in mind. of course today everybody runs a lite client.

I don't think that's entirely true. While the mainstream bitcoin client that's know known as bitcoin core was and still is the most trusted wallet, alternatives existed even from the early days. Not everyone that wanted to use bitcoin needed to run a full node even in the old days.

It also depends on what is meant by "old days". For example, I first got into Bitcoin back in mid-2011 and back then, there were no lightweight wallet options that I was aware of. I remember trying to sync the blockchain over my crappy college Internet and giving up because it took too long. Perhaps if there were lightweight wallets back then, I would have paid more attention to Bitcoin and its future potential.

Both Electrum and MultiBit are the most popular lightweight wallets for PC right now and both were released in late 2011. Same with Blockchain.info which is currently the most popular online wallet. That one was released in August 2011. Mycelium's mobile wallet was released in late 2013.

Well the bitnodes snapshots that show hundreds of thousands of nodes are from 2013, there surely were many alternatives to the full node bitcoin client back then. Plenty lightweight wallets and web wallets.

[alani123]

You could email the bitnodes team and ask for historical data. I would assume they have that data available since they've been running for a while now.

I did. Their oldest accurate data is already on their website. Old data from 2013 was inaccurate