Some time ago, I created a bitcoin network analyzer that would collect information on all the available bitcoin nodes.
The system hasn't been updated for a long time, however it was recently updated to process connection attempts much faster, while giving nodes more time to accept the connection attempts.
The database was erased and re-created today, and the next dump will include a new info, "Last_Error", which is a small string giving details on the last error we had ("timeout", "connection_refused", etc).
The main interest of these database dumps is of course historical, as it shows the progression of the bitcoin network over time. It is free to download to anyone, directly from
http://dump.bitcoin.it/misc/The next file (20120223) will restart from an empty database, with the new field, and the new scanning method. It is possible to have a realtime overview of the database from this API:
https://mtgox.com/api/stats/accepting (and people writing bitcoin clients can use the bootstrap api to collect initial bitcoin addresses to connect to:
https://mtgox.com/api/stats/bootstrap )
Anyway, this thread has two goals:
- If you have any suggestion regarding this system (extra data we could collect), let me know. I'm planning on adding a passive node too that would collect data from nodes which are not available from outside (firewalled).
- If you make anything out of the historical data available, post it here
And a last nifty thing that can be done with this:
http://maps.google.com/?q=https://mtgox.com/api/stats/bitcoin.kmlUPDATE: The next database version will also include a User_Agent field containing the user agent transmitted by the bitcoin client (see BIP#0014 for details).
