How Many Bitcoin Full Nodes Are Operated By Businesses?

[coins101]

Of the 5,300 full nodes listed on Bitnodes or Coindance, just how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?

In other words, how many ordinary individuals or ordinary businesses who are not focused on Bitcoin development run nodes - the ordinary folk on the street?

For example,

* BTCC has around 100-120 Bitcoin nodes
* There are well over 100 Bitcoin developers, so another 100 full nodes
* There are firms like Tradeblock, Chainalysis and Ellipitic who between them need lots of nodes to do analysis, so probably another 200 between them (if not much more)

So in just this small sample we have something approaching 10%.

Why does this matter? Well, it goes towards the centralization argument. All these firms and arguably most of the individuals can be censored and controlled by targeted governmental actions. So we need to know and not just sweep this issue under the rug.

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[talkbitcoin]

developers: sure
individuals interested in bitcoin and contributing to the network: sure
businesses like mining pools, exchanges, gambling sites, mixers: sure
other businesses: No. because all of them tend to use services that come in the middle and make things easier and safer for them.
for example Steam that started accepting bitcoin, they go through bitpay. there are many other big businesses that do the same, so none of them run full nodes.

and also because of the anonymity of bitcoin and Nodes that you only know their IP there is no way anyone can give the right answer to this question. unless you go around finding every single IP address and find out if it is a real IP (not VPN,...) and who owns it which is not possible.

[unamis76]

It's impossible to reach a mildly correct conclusion for this question... We can maybe study the network and see what nodes have similar IP's and which of these IP's are known people, but this still doesn't give us much information (or information that is precise). There's no other way I can think of at the moment to study this.

I assume the correct % is on the lower end. Highly doubt it goes beyond 10%, but this is just me speculating. As said, many companies go through payment gateways, so I assume only companies that run exchanges, pools and online wallets have their own nodes.

From all this I think we can conclude we have more to worry about regarding centralization in what concerns hashpower per region. Having a lot of hashrate in China is more likely to be a danger than the distribution and number of companies running nodes (or not running them).

[franky1]

when asking a question about how many use fullnodes. the question seems to not be right.
by asking how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?
it will be the majority. because your literally covering the majority of use-cases within the question

it would be better to have maybe 3 different polls

businesses
individual devs
individual users

or even as more specific questions.
how many CLUSTERS of nodes are run by a single business/individual (minimal sybil)

[coins101]

when asking a question about how many use fullnodes. the question seems to not be right.
by asking how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?
it will be the majority. because your literally covering the majority of use-cases within the question

it would be better to have maybe 3 different polls

businesses
individual devs
individual users

or even as more specific questions.
how many CLUSTERS of nodes are run by a single business/individual (minimal sybil)

Well, feel free to provide an opinion on your offered list

[~Bitcoin~]

You can add another 189 nodes ran by blockchain.info https://blockchain.info/connected-nodes

Not only business i think many tech lovers and home based miners also tend to run full node just for fun or to remain in safe side and store their bitcoin out of web wallets.
Actually running full node doesn't cost much because of cheaper diskspace and internet bandwidth so anybody who like to run and support bitcoin can run it with just few clicks.

Also few local merchants and small local bitcoin exchanger/trading platforms tend to run few nodes for secure operation. Many small bitcoin based companies and startups are popping up in every corner of the world, they will also atleast run few nodes for sure, so i don't think we have to worry about centralization of bitcoin network.

https://bitnodes.21.co/

United States   1421 (26.47%)

I think majority of this nodes are hosted over VPS, because most of the VPS provider offer US based servers.

[coins101]

It's impossible to reach a mildly correct conclusion for this question... We can maybe study the network and see what nodes have similar IP's and which of these IP's are known people, but this still doesn't give us much information (or information that is precise). There's no other way I can think of at the moment to study this.

I assume the correct % is on the lower end. Highly doubt it goes beyond 10%, but this is just me speculating. As said, many companies go through payment gateways, so I assume only companies that run exchanges, pools and online wallets have their own nodes.

From all this I think we can conclude we have more to worry about regarding centralization in what concerns hashpower per region. Having a lot of hashrate in China is more likely to be a danger than the distribution and number of companies running nodes (or not running them).

The basic starting point was that every user = a full node.

With the advent of pools, full nodes stopped being needed for mining.

[franky1]

when asking a question about how many use fullnodes. the question seems to not be right.
by asking how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?
it will be the majority. because your literally covering the majority of use-cases within the question

it would be better to have maybe 3 different polls

businesses
individual devs
individual users

or even as more specific questions.
how many CLUSTERS of nodes are run by a single business/individual (minimal sybil)

Well, feel free to provide an opinion on your offered list

there are over 300,000 merchants that accept bitcoin. but only ~5400 nodes (most are using middle men.)
making the business to node %/ratio small
there are only a few thousand 'dev's' but ~5400 nodes.
making the devs to node %/ratio LARGE

though we cannot easily know exactly who is running what. it is atleast fair/logical to say that most businesses are not running nodes. and most devs are. although some businesses. single devs may be running more then one node per entity

[coins101]

when asking a question about how many use fullnodes. the question seems to not be right.
by asking how many of them are run by Bitcoin focused businesses and Bitcoin developers?
it will be the majority. because your literally covering the majority of use-cases within the question

it would be better to have maybe 3 different polls

businesses
individual devs
individual users

or even as more specific questions.
how many CLUSTERS of nodes are run by a single business/individual (minimal sybil)

Well, feel free to provide an opinion on your offered list

there are over 300,000 merchants that accept bitcoin. but only ~5400 nodes (most are using middle men.)
making the business to node %/ratio small
there are only a few thousand 'dev's' but ~5400 nodes.
making the devs to node %/ratio LARGE

though we cannot easily know exactly who is running what. it is atleast fair/logical to say that most businesses are not running nodes. and most devs are. although some businesses. single devs may be running more then one node per entity

you sometimes run into criticism, but from my point of view your contributions are incredibly insightful and helpful.

thanks!

[Kprawn]

Not to be too critical my friend, but we cannot assume that Bitcoin merchants will be running nodes. Most merchants/businesses in third world

countries will not run nodes due to the additional bandwidth and infrastructure needed to run a node. The bandwidth is very expensive in the

third world countries and these guys will do most tx's via payment processors, because most of them convert Bitcoin to Fiat almost

immediately after they receive the bitcoins. We run several nodes from satellite sites to distribute the bandwidth burden and for redundancy. 

[CoinCidental]

i run a bitcoin unlimited node in order to show them some support but everyone who has a non trivial amount
of bitcoins should run a node to protect the network and help prevent centralisation .........

i also like to do my bit to help others in my area who may neeed to download the chain from me

[gmaxwell]

In my experience very few businesses are running full nodes; instead they mostly rely on third party APIs.

Many developers do not run nodes which are reachable to the outside world-- uses a lot of bandwidth.

Most miners use pools and do not run a full node at all.

[CoinCidental]

In my experience very few businesses are running full nodes; instead they mostly rely on third party APIs.

Many developers do not run nodes which are reachable to the outside world-- uses a lot of bandwidth.

Most miners use pools and do not run a full node at all.

my node uploads about 700MB a day .... i wouldnt call that a lot of bandwidth

i was under the imprerssion that x-thin and compact blocks are fairly economic to run
in modern clients ?

[calkob]

It would only be a guess on my part to say how many nodes are run by businesses, i know for sure tho that i am just a man on the street who is running a full node 24/7.  i cant understand why everyone else is not. 

[pereira4]

It's not possible to see what node is being run by what person or entity, so we can only guesstimate. You can add in all the bitcoin experts and people that talk about it all the time like Andreas A or Trace Mayer or all those guys, they all run nodes, they all want to activate segwit as soon as possible so thats 0.13.1 nodes.

[coins101]

It would only be a guess on my part to say how many nodes are run by businesses, i know for sure tho that i am just a man on the street who is running a full node 24/7.  i cant understand why everyone else is not. 

You make Bitcoin what it is.

Good for you.

[coins101]

In my experience very few businesses are running full nodes; instead they mostly rely on third party APIs.

Many developers do not run nodes which are reachable to the outside world-- uses a lot of bandwidth.

Most miners use pools and do not run a full node at all.

my node uploads about 700MB a day .... i wouldnt call that a lot of bandwidth

i was under the imprerssion that x-thin and compact blocks are fairly economic to run
in modern clients ?

It sounds like we have a little more decentralisation than I thought going into this.  Just too few full nodes, perhaps.

[CoinCidental]

In my experience very few businesses are running full nodes; instead they mostly rely on third party APIs.

Many developers do not run nodes which are reachable to the outside world-- uses a lot of bandwidth.

Most miners use pools and do not run a full node at all.

my node uploads about 700MB a day .... i wouldnt call that a lot of bandwidth

i was under the imprerssion that x-thin and compact blocks are fairly economic to run
in modern clients ?

It sounds like we have a little more decentralisation than I thought going into this.  Just too few full nodes, perhaps.

 i would say quite a lot of people are running a full client but they forget to open port 8333 on the router to allow incoming connections so they are basically leeeching from the network without giving back
there should be a popup warning in the client as most people probably have no idea and may think theyre runnning a node when they arent ....   
this applies whether your running core or bitcoin unlimited client,get that

[raphma]

Why does this matter? Well, it goes towards the centralization argument. All these firms and arguably most of the individuals can be censored and controlled by targeted governmental actions. So we need to know and not just sweep this issue under the rug.

kinda agree with you, but, to me, the whole decentralization argument is about being able to run your node...
even if some nodes can be censored, i doubt it would be the majority.

[gmaxwell]

my node uploads about 700MB a day .... i wouldnt call that a lot of bandwidth

You probably aren't accepting inbound connections, or are potentially in a /16 with many other nodes so you are connected to less often.   About 300GB/month transfer is not atypical for a node with inbound connections.

BIP152 reduces the data used to send blocks, but that data was only about 12% of the overall.