From 370,000 Full Bitcoin Nodes to 6,000: What happened?

[p2pbucks]

if we  pump the price to 1000+usd then everything would be solved 。。。temporarily  . if the price bypass 10k usd ,then  then everything would be solved permanently  .

[iram66680]

-snip-
Perhaps that a reward program can make things look completely different. For example, full nodes running longer than 2 weeks get 0.001BTC per 24 hours as compensation. (it's just an example) Only not sure how feasible this is.

There is already an reward program which randomly chooses a user to give $10 USD to per week. This didn't help to increase nodes.

More importantly, who's going to fund this? There are 5809 nodes out there as of this post. You would have to pay 5.809 BTC per day for the nodes to have incentive. If it increases in the future, 10BTC or more would have to be used. If you take away transaction fees from miners, there wouldn't be any incentive for them to mine anymore when the block rewards decreases.

if we  pump the price to 1000+usd then everything would be solved 。。。temporarily  . if the price bypass 10k usd ,then  then everything would be solved permanently  .

Again, this is baseless. People would still use multibit, electrum and other light weight clients.

[Lauda]

There is already an reward program which randomly chooses a user to give $10 USD to per week. This didn't help to increase nodes.

More importantly, who's going to fund this? There are 5809 nodes out there as of this post. You would have to pay 5.809 BTC per day for the nodes to have incentive. If it increases in the future, 10BTC or more would have to be used. If you take away transaction fees from miners, there wouldn't be any incentive for them to mine anymore when the block rewards decreases.

if we  pump the price to 1000+usd then everything would be solved 。。。temporarily  . if the price bypass 10k usd ,then  then everything would be solved permanently  .

Again, this is baseless. People would still use multibit, electrum and other light weight clients.

Are you talking about this? Maybe just a lot of people aren't aware of it, however it isn't much of a 'incentives' program since it rewards only a single random node from a group of 100. However, you're right. Even if they would pay out each node only $1 weekly, that's still a lot of money and you can't strip the miners from their money either.
A rise in the price isn't going to solve anything. Anyone running Bitcoin QT is not a node without port forwarding.

[p2pbucks]

There is already an reward program which randomly chooses a user to give $10 USD to per week. This didn't help to increase nodes.

More importantly, who's going to fund this? There are 5809 nodes out there as of this post. You would have to pay 5.809 BTC per day for the nodes to have incentive. If it increases in the future, 10BTC or more would have to be used. If you take away transaction fees from miners, there wouldn't be any incentive for them to mine anymore when the block rewards decreases.

if we  pump the price to 1000+usd then everything would be solved 。。。temporarily  . if the price bypass 10k usd ,then  then everything would be solved permanently  .

Again, this is baseless. People would still use multibit, electrum and other light weight clients.

Are you talking about this? Maybe just a lot of people aren't aware of it, however it isn't much of a 'incentives' program since it rewards only a single random node from a group of 100. However, you're right. Even if they would pay out each node only $1 weekly, that's still a lot of money and you can't strip the miners from their money either.
A rise in the price isn't going to solve anything. Anyone running Bitcoin QT is not a node without port forwarding.

No , price is the key to solve everything

Let's image what will happen if the price reach 10k usd or more :

0. more than 100 million bitcoin users in the world .( if you deny this then ignore this reply )

1. people/companies will build large data center to store public ledger in different countries . Or even emit satellites  to store blockchain . As a result , blockchain size problem will be permanently solved .

2. bitcoin will be become the number 1 or 2 payment method in the world and also the important way to store value . people will reach a common sense for this .

3. traditional banks fall , bitcoin industry rise .

Once bitcoin plays a key role in our life , second or third layer protocol will be designed to overcome the technical obstacles (blockchain size , tx time etc ...) .

[Lauda]

No , price is the key to solve everything

Let's image what will happen if the price reach 10k usd or more :

0. more than 100 million bitcoin users in the world .( if you deny this then ignore this reply )
-snip-

What a bunch of nonsense. Creating a bubble doesn't solve any problems.

Behavioral finance theory attributes stock market bubbles to cognitive biases that lead to groupthink and herd behavior.

Bubbles can occur in pretty much everywhere. Any rising stock attracts investors, although once the bubble starts to correct itself everything turns upside down. You've described a situation where people would only join Bitcoin to make more money and sell for fiat as soon as possible. Bitcoin doesn't need such people.

I'm not going to ignore your post, I'm going to put you on my ignore list.

[Amph]

if we  pump the price to 1000+usd then everything would be solved 。。。temporarily  . if the price bypass 10k usd ,then  then everything would be solved permanently  .

only if it is a natural growth, and not manipulated, otherwise it will only fall back from where it come from, like it happened to 1200 peak

and we don't need another great bubble that burst after few weeks, again, because each of those bubbles will frighten newcomers, especially if the price is high enough like it was with the last one

[Rotten Egg]

Here is the probable and rational reasoning of node drop...

The drop in nodes is explainable by precisely ONE thing, which some tech deep developers appear to have little knowledge of:

Ease of use.

Users are running less full nodes simply because they don't have to. Wallets like Electrum and Mycelium are far lighter on system resources, and quicker to get started with. The same would be true if the block size was cut to 100KB. I could run a full node on my current system, but screw that. Even 5% of system CPU going to some background process is unwanted on my day-to-day machine. The same for even a paltry 5 GB of blockchain data which I could be using for cat pictures. Running the full client of a brand new copypaste altcoin is still irritating compared to using Electrum.

Businesses are also running less full nodes because THEY. DON'T. HAVE. TO. Which is quicker: figuring out how to install and configure a bitcoind, or just calling some blockchain.info javascript API or whatever? The latter, by a mile, for the majority of developers. Perhaps not for a Bitcoin Core dev, but most just want to make some cool app and aren't viewing everything through some ultra-decentralisation ideology.

The drop in nodes has nothing to do with block size: The full client has never been a lightweight piece of software, and the majority of people only used it because there was simply no alternative.
If anyone wants to actually understand Bitcoin's decentralisation, they might try making some kind of comparisons with the Tor network and number of relays or exit nodes and its usage. (Twice as old as Bitcoin, widely used, ~6000 relays which can be run by pretty much anyone, ~1000 exit nodes running one of which actually paints you as a target for law enforcement bother.)

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/383sbw/the_drop_in_full_nodes_is_explainable_by/

[p2pbucks]

No , price is the key to solve everything

Let's image what will happen if the price reach 10k usd or more :

0. more than 100 million bitcoin users in the world .( if you deny this then ignore this reply )
-snip-

What a bunch of nonsense. Creating a bubble doesn't solve any problems.

Behavioral finance theory attributes stock market bubbles to cognitive biases that lead to groupthink and herd behavior.

Bubbles can occur in pretty much everywhere. Any rising stock attracts investors, although once the bubble starts to correct itself everything turns upside down. You've described a situation where people would only join Bitcoin to make more money and sell for fiat as soon as possible. Bitcoin doesn't need such people.

I'm not going to ignore your post, I'm going to put you on my ignore list.

haha ... you reply only shows how short sighted you are

People/big money would not focus on bitcoin so much without 1200usd bubble  . bitcoin is money , It's all about money , not only blockchain tech .   

[jubalix]

this is why perhaps POS/Peercoin may have an advantage.

Running a node costs less, so it could become much more distributed.

Eg as raspberry pi.

2000$ in peercoin guarantees hardware costs in about 2 years.

there is no such guarantee with asics infact quite the opposite.

[Acidyo]

Hello,

Are we taking into account the (SPV) Nodes? My first guess is all the bs government regulation has scared alot of people, and the simple fact that mining isn't profitable anymore has people going back to their day jobs. When BTC pops back over $800-$1000 they will all be running back saying we love bitcoin. Just watch and see.

[EternalWingsofGod]

6000 nodes is what I find to be a very low number, especially when it once was far over 300,000  I am happy to contribute with 2 full nodes.

Perhaps that a reward program can make things look completely different. For example, full nodes running longer than 2 weeks get 0.001BTC per 24 hours as compensation. (it's just an example) Only not sure how feasible this is.

It's an interesting idea as miners are able to merge mine as a reward, but it would take a change in the code, that said the units rewarded would not be Bitcoins but altcoins.
The alternative would be to add a proof of stake to the system as well as a mining element but at this point in time that type of forking proposal is unlikely, it could emerge though once circulation and mining rewards decrease a few forks in the future if their are concerns about a lack of incentivization to mine/ hold nodes.

[Lauda]

this is why perhaps POS/Peercoin may have an advantage.

Running a node costs less, so it could become much more distributed.
Eg as raspberry pi.

2000$ in peercoin guarantees hardware costs in about 2 years.
there is no such guarantee with asics infact quite the opposite.

You might be onto something. However, peercoin will never get to the place where Bitcoin is. The market cap was at a level similar to the one before the spike in 2013 just 2 months back. It might get another chance if we go into another bubble phase, but that's about it. One can usually find a few potentially useful features if we look at certain altcoins, however Bitcoin is what it is.
I guess running a node at home shouldn't be a problem for people who have unlimited bandwidth?

[coins101]

this is why perhaps POS/Peercoin may have an advantage.

Running a node costs less, so it could become much more distributed.
Eg as raspberry pi.

2000$ in peercoin guarantees hardware costs in about 2 years.
there is no such guarantee with asics infact quite the opposite.

You might be onto something. However, peercoin will never get to the place where Bitcoin is. The market cap was at a level similar to the one before the spike in 2013 just 2 months back. It might get another chance if we go into another bubble phase, but that's about it. One can usually find a few potentially useful features if we look at certain altcoins, however Bitcoin is what it is.
I guess running a node at home shouldn't be a problem for people who have unlimited bandwidth?

Proof of stake was an idea put forward by Gavin to Satoshi in order to solve the issue of people creating scripts and endlessly sending transactions to themselves at zero cost in fees or something along those lines.

Bitcoin has something built in that still does something along the lines of proof of stake. I'll have to hunt around for the reference.

Anyway.....there was a paper that said PoS coins needed to use a centralized reference node:  

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113791/neucoin-whitepaper-reveals-first-mathematically-watertight-proof-of-stake-currency

[phMining]

I'm doing some research on Bitcoin nodes and how to increase their numbers.

As part of that I thought I had better get some reference points. These are the results:

https://i.imgur.com/nYfPo7j.jpg

Q1. Can the numbers indicating that there were over 370k nodes be trusted?

Q2. Why was there such a sharp fall in numbers? GPU and then ASICs?

Q3. Is is possible to ever see that number again?

Source for 370k number was worked out from:

http://bitnodes.io

Wow, wir sind nach China und USA No 3 in der Welt, stärker als Russland und Kanada. Nochmal WOW !

Sehr stolz der junge Skywalker nun seien ...


https://i.imgur.com/YaO5OYY.gif

edit

BTC user disclosure runs Bitnodes, the source of the above data. He has answered the questions:

The early December 2013 network snapshots, i.e. with over 100k nodes, are not valid as the crawler at that time took several hours just to complete one full network snapshot and it includes all nodes from addr responses which can be faked or likely stale. Those snapshots were linked to from getaddr.bitnodes.io/SNAPSHOT_NUMBER/ which have been removed since.

With the new crawler released in late Dec 2013, the crawl time was brought down significantly down to sub 5 minutes with considerably good churn rate. I use the churn rate to measure how good a network snapshot is. A value of 0 implies the network snapshot was taken instantly but of course that's not possible. At the moment, we are seeing a typical churn rate of 30+: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/

I would think killing GPU mining would have severely dropped the node count. I fear for all of these multi-million dollar farms out there that are literally going belly up as soon as the block reward drops again 

[coins101]

...I would think killing GPU mining would have severely dropped the node count. I fear for all of these multi-million dollar farms out there that are literally going belly up as soon as the block reward drops again 

I've been pondering the reward drop coming up.

One of the things that crossed my mind was this whole issue of block size increases. A reward halving would make transaction fees more attractive. But maybe that's one conspiracy theory too far.

[phMining]

...I would think killing GPU mining would have severely dropped the node count. I fear for all of these multi-million dollar farms out there that are literally going belly up as soon as the block reward drops again 

I've been pondering the reward drop coming up.

One of the things that crossed my mind was this whole issue of block size increases. A reward halving would make transaction fees more attractive. But maybe that's one conspiracy theory too far.

Hey now... Bitcoin is all about a decentralized LIMITED currency. The reward halving is all in the name of keeping this currency stable. This isn't about making money. If people begin to increase transaction fees simply to make it more rewarding for miners losing out on this drop in reward... we're no better than VISA and very much against the fabric of why bitcoin was created. This will tell a lot. Bitcoin is either going to crumble or become more stable.

[Lauda]

Proof of stake was an idea put forward by Gavin to Satoshi in order to solve the issue of people creating scripts and endlessly sending transactions to themselves at zero cost in fees or something along those lines.

Bitcoin has something built in that still does something along the lines of proof of stake. I'll have to hunt around for the reference.

Anyway.....there was a paper that said PoS coins needed to use a centralized reference node:  

http://cointelegraph.com/news/113791/neucoin-whitepaper-reveals-first-mathematically-watertight-proof-of-stake-currency

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this. Well I think that it is too late to introduce something as PoS. It is too late to change the fundamentals of Bitcoin.
There was also some talk about someone saying that it is inevitable to change the 21M supply. Changing something fundamental as that (block size is not part of this) would most likely kill Bitcoin.

I would think killing GPU mining would have severely dropped the node count. I fear for all of these multi-million dollar farms out there that are literally going belly up as soon as the block reward drops again  

Well yes, after we moved from CPU mining things have definitely changed. We need to figure out a solution for the nodes, so that they don't decrease to a number that might be deemed as dangerous (e.g. slow).

[Scamalert]

Issent just becasue the bitcoin core is too "heavy to run?
Most people has changed to multibit or electrum by now.
No point of running a full node when it takes so long to syncronize and the blockchain is many giga bytes.
I dumped bitcoin core long ago. Only using electrum now. Super fast and slick.

[Amph]

Issent just becasue the bitcoin core is too "heavy to run?
Most people has changed to multibit or electrum by now.
No point of running a full node when it takes so long to syncronize and the blockchain is many giga bytes.
I dumped bitcoin core long ago. Only using electrum now. Super fast and slick.

this because they have a shitty computer, you can sync in less than an hour with an ssd, evo is the best choice, anyone should buy one and not for bitcoin only

running a full node should be encouraged with a reward though, maybe not something in the line of a faucet reward...

[Xialla]

running a full node should be encouraged with a reward though, maybe not something in the line of a faucet reward...

THIS.

simply, there is lack of motivation to run full bitcoin node. you need SSD (because on HDD it consumes lot of I/O - at least in my case), open new port on firewall, update it time to time, it consumes lot of CPU/memory resources and bandwidth..and as a result is good feeling - which is obviously not enough anymore.

PS: and yes, I'm running full node for last 2 years..