Bandwith used by Bitcoin is almost irelevant right? Super low?

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

Bandwith used by Bitcoin is almost irelevant right? Super low?

I could be wrong here but to me it seems bitcoin doesn't need much bandwith at all. Basically like sending a medium sized text file every few minutes bandwith wise.

I'm just wondering if I up my mining considerably if I'll need to upgrade my connection at some point.

Obviously 4 or 8 5970s isn't a problem but if you've got say 100+ going at it or you're doing 50ghash/s are you going to be burning up bandwith or is the consumption that super low?

Obviously if you can afford 100+ high end GPU's and the hardware then you can afford some more internet.

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[caveden]

Currently it is quite low, and I guess it'll remain like that for a while. But one day it might require more bandwidth than average home users have.

[jgarzik]

Mining consumes very little bandwidth.

Running a bitcoin P2P node consumes a noticeable amount of bandwidth -- my VPS ran out of its 1000GB allocation this month.

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

Mining consumes very little bandwidth.

Running a bitcoin P2P node consumes a noticeable amount of bandwidth -- my VPS ran out of its 1000GB allocation this month.

Ok tried to get info on the node on my own, I failed going to admit to being the newb here.

I know the general meaning of "node" but I'm not sure how it ties in to P2P and bitcoins.
I understand how mining works you just completely lost me on node.

Is that something I'd want to do, what are the benefits / costs etc?
If it generally goes by another name and I can research it on my own I'll save you some time if you tell me what to look in to.

Thanks.

[chromicant]

Mining consumes very little bandwidth.

Running a bitcoin P2P node consumes a noticeable amount of bandwidth -- my VPS ran out of its 1000GB allocation this month.

Do you have an idea what part of the protocol munched up most of the bandwidth? It's a definite concern for people who want to run seed nodes to stabilize the network, as well as people interested in a mobile client.

If I had to guess, would it be exchanging/downloading the block chain?

[Hal]

Mining consumes very little bandwidth.

Running a bitcoin P2P node consumes a noticeable amount of bandwidth -- my VPS ran out of its 1000GB allocation this month.

Wow, do you mean your bitcoin client communicated a terabyte in a month??? That doesn't sound right.

Average block size is about 3.5 kB, that makes about 15 MB/month. If you had 100 peers that could be maybe 2 GB/month.

[jgarzik]

Mining consumes very little bandwidth.

Running a bitcoin P2P node consumes a noticeable amount of bandwidth -- my VPS ran out of its 1000GB allocation this month.

Do you have an idea what part of the protocol munched up most of the bandwidth? It's a definite concern for people who want to run seed nodes to stabilize the network, as well as people interested in a mobile client.

If I had to guess, would it be exchanging/downloading the block chain?

Relaying blocks, relaying TX's, and a lot of initial-block-downloads, I suspect.  I don't have hard data besides "bitcoind was the only thing running on that VPS."

[Hal]

The block file is 90MB. So you'd have to do 11,000 initial block downloads.

[jgarzik]

This server averages 80-100 connections normally.  I modded the outbound limit, it's not behind a NAT, and it advertises itself on IRC.

So it is designed to be popular.  But 360 block chain downloads per day?  I have no idea if that is realistic or not for this server.