Perhaps. For the last several years, however, I've hardly noticed the presence. Typically fully opened, sometimes outbound only, sometimes running multiple nodes (production, development, test, core, classic, xt, bu)- not an issue. If it ever gets to be a strain, I'll throttle back from fully promiscuous (at the moment, I have 63 inbound connections) to something lower.
I've had a different experience, possibly because I've been running a full node non-stop since 2011 (maybe more nodes have mine in their peers list)?
At some point last year (maybe 2 years ago) my node was saturating my upload to the point where normal web browsing would not function smoothly. I had to reduce max connections (to around 20) in order to continue supporting the network. I guess a gimped node is better than none at all.
Eventually, I upgraded my internet from top tier cable to top tier fiber. Now I'm back to non-gimped mode. I have the best possible home internet available in my area, and it's not cheap.
Yet, this is all with the 1 MB limit in place. Just recently, in a different thread, PeterR pointed out that he had his BU node set to accept 16 MB blocks today! I'm of the opinion that if you build it, they will come, meaning it will not take long for those blocks to be full of no-fee-paying transactions, for whatever purpose someone happens to come up with. If that would be the case, there is no way my home internet could possibly do much more than a few connections at a time. I, personally, believe this would lead to a lot of people to refuse incoming connections entirely. If a Bitcoin fanatic like myself can't afford to run a full (non-gimped) node, well there will probably be a steep drop in available nodes. I don't think this is the direction we want to be going at this point in the experiment.
We have r0ach telling us that governments are going to co-opt Bitcoin, and while I argue that Bitcoin will be able to survive such attempts, if we start eroding decentralization of the network from inside, he could be right.
I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm 100% correct and big blockers are 100% wrong. I always say that I simply prefer to err on the side of decentralization. It's obvious to me that increasing the traffic required to keep the network running does harm decentralization to some degree.
On a side note, I typically have over 100 connections, and I ban anything that isn't Core .12 or newer. Meaning, I'm feeding lots of block chain data to full nodes as opposed to whatever the countless bitcoinj connections are asking for.
IOW: I can keep it up longer than you can hold your breath. Certainly long enough to resolve the current scaling solution impasse, AAR.
You mean the impasse that is 3-4 years old now? Heh, a lot can happen in that amount of time.
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