Hello all,
I'm a software engineer who has spent much of this year trying to gain a better understanding of Bitcoin's network of nodes and I'm now at the point where I could use feedback and support from the community.
My journey began when I asked the question:
How many Bitcoin nodes is enough? Many people were worried about the declining number of nodes, myself included, but I wanted to prove or dispel those worries with hard numbers.
To help answer this question I created
the Statoshi fork of Bitcoin Core and
began digging deeper into the messages being passed around between nodes.
After a few months I felt that Statoshi was ready for node enthusiasts to run on their own and
released the project. The setup process is fairly complicated due to all of the software dependencies, but I hope to make this process much easier by eventually releasing Docker containers that will handle the dependencies automatically.
Because I want these statistics to be readily available to the public without requiring installation of Statoshi, I
built a public dashboard that is easier to use. You can find it at
http://statoshi.infoAfter monitoring the network for 6 months, I
posted my findings regarding the health of the node network. Long story short, the network is healthy but we always desire more nodes to make it more robust and decentralized.
I have plenty of ideas for the future direction of this project, some of which
I outlined in this post.
If you're interested in this project, I would appreciate your help. Potential ways you could contribute:
- Post ideas for new stats / charts / features, either on here or by creating an issue on Github.
- Submit pull requests for new stats collection to the Github project.
- Play around with building custom charts on statoshi.info to see if you can find any interesting correlations. If you're unfamiliar with Grafana you can watch some how-to screencasts here. If you build a chart that may be useful for the community you can save it as a JSON payload and send it to me to store permanently.
- Donations to my 1STAToshi address will only be used to pay for server costs; my current costs are $40 / month for the statoshi.info server
- If you have high bandwidth servers that you'd be willing to donate toward running a fleet of managed Statoshi nodes, that would be greatly appreciated.
Anyone who wishes to contact me off-forum can find me through
https://onename.io/lopp
