So I received one of the bitnodes and fired it up on the network. What a neat little box. Not being 100% savvy about how the bitcoin network handles traffic, I was surprised to see that my little node has already had some transactions that it relayed first according to blockchain.info.
How did my node receive a transaction first? I've read about the broadcasting and such, but wondered if it had to do with proximity when finding peers to broadcast to or what?
A non technical response works
Blockchain.info only displays who sends
them a TX first. This only means that your node was connected to a node by bc.i and to another node that was not connect to bc.i, but had a TX they (bc.i) did not have. Its possible that your node was the nth in a longer line, bc.i however can not detect that.
e.g.: Origin Node -> A -> B -> C -> your node -> bc.i node
