How many nodes is too many in Bitcoin's current state?

[ElectricSheep]

Has anyone done the math on this?

How many nodes would be too many for the network to stay sufficiently in sync in the 10 minute block times? I'm sure its an extremely high number but I'd be interested to know for curiosity sake.

[figmentofmyass]

there's never "too many" nodes.

if every node had too many connections (8 outgoing connections is plenty) it would degrade network performance. otherwise, the more the merrier. pieter wuille discusses this issue:

Please don't change this, as there is no need. Connectable peers on the network are a scarce resource, and essential to the decentralization. If people go try connect to all of them like some sites do, we'll very quickly run out.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8109/how-does-one-attain-1-000-connections-like-blockchain-info/8140#8140

[ElectricSheep]

there's never "too many" nodes.

if every node had too many connections (8 outgoing connections is plenty) it would degrade network performance. otherwise, the more the merrier. pieter wuille discusses this issue:

Please don't change this, as there is no need. Connectable peers on the network are a scarce resource, and essential to the decentralization. If people go try connect to all of them like some sites do, we'll very quickly run out.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8109/how-does-one-attain-1-000-connections-like-blockchain-info/8140#8140

My question wasn't regarding having nodes with more connections it was pointing out that say, for example, 10's of millions of nodes - would there be a latency having a unified chain state accross all those nodes in the 10 minute interval?

[joniboini]

I'm not sure if anyone has done the math on this, but there is a paper on block propagation latency and how to speed it up[1].
There's some latency test/experiment there which might interest you. You might also find this discussion interesting[2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1809/1809.00455.pdf
[2] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10821/how-long-does-it-take-to-propagate-a-newly-created-block-to-the-entire-bitcoin-n

[squatter]

My question wasn't regarding having nodes with more connections it was pointing out that say, for example, 10's of millions of nodes - would there be a latency having a unified chain state accross all those nodes in the 10 minute interval?

No, the total number of nodes is not important there. Latency is not a major issue at these block sizes.

What matters is the ratio of peers allowing incoming connections to those who don't. If there are 10 million non-reachable nodes and only a handful of reachable nodes, the network will have major problems since most nodes will be unable to make outgoing connections to receive blocks.

If the network added 10 million nodes today reflecting the current distribution of reachable nodes, it wouldn't be an issue.