What's happened with Chinese nodes?

[gentlemand]

At the height of China's command over the Bitcoin market a couple or more years ago the number of full nodes there regularly fell below 100.

I've just had a look and the number of full nodes has gone up hugely in the last few months to over 2000 now, in fact it's added over 1000 in the last month alone.

https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/?days=730

Can anyone in the know tell me why this has happened?

[figmentofmyass]

At the height of China's command over the Bitcoin market a couple or more years ago the number of full nodes there regularly fell below 100.

we have to keep in mind that we're talking about listening/reachable nodes, so any stats like this need to be taken with a grain of salt. the numbers from 2016-2017 are quite low given the number of services (exchanges, wallets, mining pools) in china.

maybe a lot more people there use third party services rather than full nodes. or maybe we're looking at bad data.

I've just had a look and the number of full nodes has gone up hugely in the last few months to over 2000 now, in fact it's added over 1000 in the last month alone.

https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/?days=730

Can anyone in the know tell me why this has happened?

i doubt if anyone could tell you. it looks like thousands of chinese nodes are being run out of datacenters. i can't tell when they were spun up. given that more than half were spun up in the last 6 weeks, i wouldn't consider it organic growth, nor important.

[vit05]

This is quite curious. I can not contextualize a logic that can explain something like this. What I understand is that these are listening nodes. But when it's really hard to locate most of the nodes, I do not know if that's such an important thing. Maybe China is moving to free Bitcoin again.

[aleksej996]

When talking about China's presence on the Internet, you always need to take into account their government.
These new nodes could be entirely run by state and regular user nodes could be blocked.

There are some malicious possibilities here as someone might be looking to get a higher proportion of the P2P network.
Maybe something to do with the mining, trying to slow down other miners from getting new blocks by not broadcasting them as soon as they receive them or something like that.
Perhaps they just like having these attacks as an option, who knows. I just don't trust it.

[hl5460]

My best guess is that lots of traditional internet companies in China have established research team for blockchain. And they usually start with bitcoin.

[AdSkull89]

My best guess is that lots of traditional internet companies in China have established research team for blockchain. And they usually start with bitcoin.

I tend to agree. Also the whole buzz in media and ease on cryptocurrency probably stimulated a lot of individuals to try out this new field.

[miramare]

My best guess is that lots of traditional internet companies in China have established research team for blockchain. And they usually start with bitcoin.

The guess sounds very reasonable. As I know, nearly all of the big internet Chinese companies have started to study blockchain, even though they declaim to the public that they are clearly against Bitcoin and ICOs due to the government's requirement.

[Mobius88]

At the height of China's command over the Bitcoin market a couple or more years ago the number of full nodes there regularly fell below 100.

I've just had a look and the number of full nodes has gone up hugely in the last few months to over 2000 now, in fact it's added over 1000 in the last month alone.

https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/?days=730

Can anyone in the know tell me why this has happened?

Chinese just playing around the stocks and policy. They clearly realize how to use news and stocks to benefit and how to deal with the goverment restrictions. Because now they are getting ready for the new big project as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched a surprise cryptocurrency mining platform, unconfirmed sources surfacing.

CnLedger, a Twitter-based local crypto news information provider, relayed the report from Chinese Internet service qq.com, stating Alibaba’s ‘P2P Nodes’ platform had “launched” after a registration in October 2017.

According to the available material from cnLedger, Alibaba “may incorporate” P2P Nodes in its e-commerce platform “in future”:https://twitter.com/cnLedger?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcointelegraph.com%2Fnews%2Fchinas-alibaba-launches-crypto-mining-platform-despite-restrictions-say-local-sources

In a further development, fellow Chinese conglomerate Tencent has registered a “Blockchain-related trademark” for an entity referred to variously as ‘Ether Lock’ and ‘Ethernet Lock.’

So, let's trust the facts, not just words