Bitcoin p2p Network Status Charts.

[nibor]

We have just launched a new website that monitors the health and status of the Bitcoin P2P network.

There are an assortment of charts that show for example the number of hosts, messages per hour etc.. over time. We are collecting statistics on 10 metrics at the moment and have plans to add to them. We have only been collecting data for a few days, but over time it will become a valuable tool.

Website is at:
http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk


Any comments welcome.


Thanks

RowIT Ltd.



Examples of charts are:

[GideonGono]

great job!

[Cryptoman]

Wow, 60k nodes.  Thanks for putting up the site.  Nice job.

[GideonGono]

Does a mining rig count as a node? Also if there are multiple bitcoiners in a household where they share an IP does that show up as one or multiple nodes?

[nibor]

Whether mining rigs show up is determined by whether they are running a bitcoin client that is connected to the main p2p network. If they are then it will if not it will not.

If you have multiple clients behind one NAT router they will show up as one in my stats.

Thanks for the interest. Will be interesting in a few months time to see how the charts trend and whether the number of hosts and the exchange rate have any correlation!

[Bert]

Very nice. Now all that is needed is an IP map like http://nsa.unaligned.org/ or http://xkcd.com/195/

EDIT: Actually you kind of have that covered by the country graphs. Great stuff, will be very interesting to watch over the coming months and years. Sent a donation.

[molecular]

cool stuff!

[LightRider]

Thanks for the much needed metrics! It will be interesting and fun to watch them grow over time.

[Stephen Gornick]

Quite a difference between these numbers and the stats here: http://smsz.net/btcStats/accepting



https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Map

[Clark]

These graphs are great! Keep up the good work.

[fornit]

nice!

can you aggregate the data for the countries?
the graph is barely readable and the big "other" is a little ackward.
how about continents? or at least join countries into somewhat bigger entities.

[nibor]

Quite a difference between these numbers and the stats here: http://smsz.net/btcStats/accepting



https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Map

Yes a big difference. What I did notice was reading the wiki entry it says:

It represent the total number of unique IPs seen within the last 3 hours on the network.

This would explain it as hosts only transmit their address every 24 hours. However in reality it is a lot more often than that as they are relayed, hosts stop and start etc... So monitoring over a 3 hour window instead of the 24 hour that we do could easily explain the difference.

But as it is a decentralised network nobody can be totally sure who is right!

[Alex Thornton]

Wow, great charts.

I have a few questions:

How close do you think the total 60k hosts is to the actual number of hosts. Is it even possible to be certain that you counted the vast majority (ie. 99%) of active hosts?

In the chart depicting the number of hosts in each country, you list "other" as a category. Does this category of around 10,500 hosts consist of other countries and unknown locations or just other countries?

[nibor]

I think that the chances are these charts are overestimates of number of hosts rather than underestimates.

We did a simulation of the whole network to prove that the methodology was correct:

https://github.com/n1bor/bitcoin-simulation

But if someone downloads the client, runs it for 5 mins then loses interest and shuts it down we will count them as a host for the following 24 hours.

For the estimate of the number of hosts that are listening though these charts underestimate. As by default hosts are limited to 125 connections, and when that is full they will not accept any more. As such in the total of listening hosts we will not include them once they reach the 125 as we can not connect. Currently if you leave a host running it seems to reach 125 connections after about 1 week - not sure what to conclude from this though.


Regarding the "other" countries these are just a long list of other countries. When I get a chance I will add a table to the site that lists them all and their last number of hosts connected.

[tcatm]

I recently created this chart https://i.imgur.com/sotmB.png (y: seconds, x: blocks)

Maybe it's something you could add to your site? It might be useful to detect irregular timestamps.

[nibor]

Just added the full list of hosts by country to the bottom of the front page. Makes interesting reading.


Country   Number of Hosts
United States   17590
Russian Federation   4805
Ukraine   3799
Germany   3601
Poland   3163
Canada   2425
United Kingdom   2401
Australia   1364
Netherlands   1160
China   1075
Belarus   1064
Romania   973
Sweden   889
European Union   839
Czech Republic   670
France   646
Malaysia   615
Brazil   600
Thailand   551
Bulgaria   551
Spain   529
Finland   525
Serbia   457
Bosnia and Herzegowina   416
Argentina   384
Italy   382
Hungary   370
Austria   358
Switzerland   309
Ireland   296
India   291
Belgium   282
Lithuania   280
Denmark   279
Norway   279
New Zealand   275
Macedonia   269
Israel   265
Portugal   259
South Africa   238
Mexico   229
Croatia (LOCAL Name: Hrvatska)   204
Slovenia   188
Singapore   178
Georgia   168
Philippines   151
Greece   143
Colombia   138
Slovakia (SLOVAK Republic)   119
Japan   116
Chile   114
Moldova Republic of   111
Viet Nam   105
Montenegro   102
Taiwan; Republic of China (ROC)   99
Estonia   98
Kazakhstan   97
Hong Kong   93
Latvia   86
Trinidad and Tobago   67
Turkey   65
Venezuela   61
Armenia   52
Korea Republic of   49
Mongolia   41
Cyprus   38
Saudi Arabia   36
Indonesia   35
Morocco   34
Iceland   31
Luxembourg   30
Saint Vincent and The Grenadines   28
Sri Lanka   25
Uruguay   19
Egypt   18
Paraguay   17
Jamaica   16
Bangladesh   15
Ecuador   13
Puerto Rico   12
Kyrgyzstan   11
Pakistan   10
Antigua and Barbuda   9
Lebanon   8
Bahrain   7
El Salvador   6
Maldives   5
Tanzania United Republic of   4
Barbados   3
Cape Verde   2
Afghanistan   1

[ThePok]

Great site! Never take it down!

[molecular]

It might be really interesting to see "number of hosts per capita" for each country.

[Bert]

It might be really interesting to see "number of hosts per capita" for each country.

It is a shame that the CIA World Factbook does not just return numbers for population of each country.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2119.html#rs

[Simon Barber]

I'd be very interested in some statistics on how long it takes transactions and blocks to propagate across the bitcoin network. Could you collect some data on these times? I.E. Measure when you receive a particular tx or block from different nodes, and track something like the 95% percentile of the delay.

Having good data on this (especially for blocks) is relevant to any discussion of changing the blocktime to less than the current 10 minutes.