Also, running my CPU at 80-90% utilization is not great.
Will come back if this becomes GPU mineable, until then, you're in the hands of the cpu farms my friend.
I don't think CPU farms (or in the future GPU farms) are to be blamed.
They are just part of nature.
And good for them to achieve that high hash rate.
That's not the problem.
The real problem I see while looking through the IP-addresses of 500 connections (4 full nodes each fully occupied with 125 incoming connections) is that such CPU farms let each of their computers make a separate connection with an outside full node, so I often see 5 times, 6 times.... 8 times the same IP (but with different port) within the same full node using up available connections that could serve many more people instead.
That's the reason why so many complain about not being able to sync.
Because that is what takes away much needed open connections from everyone else,
and it also doesn't even really serve the CPU farms themselves.
They could just as easily have similar results by having all their local nodes in a local network and connect all of them with just one full node (well-connected to the outside) and still achieve the same results regarding block propagation and hash rate. This kind of local centralization might even help them reduce orphan generation (all their sub-nodes will know at the exact same time that work of a new height has to be calculated).
So I think I'm going to try the following:
I will add some functionality that will allow full node operators to set a limit to how often the same IP is allowed to have incoming connections with them.
Full nodes will then be able to automatically deny incoming connections from IPs they already have a set amount of connections with.
Something like...
Hmm.... let's see if something like this is already hidden in the code somewhere... those bitcoin devs have lots of stuff lying around in there... lol
while i support the idea, you will essentially block some VPNs here. which I guess is okay. we should move this to telegram or discord though.