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We don't control that website, and thus don't control that metric. Fudders are gonna fud. It's what they do.
Hmm... that website doesn't really seem anti-bitcoin. And if you're gonna write all that code you must be at least a little interested. I was simply thinking someone here might know the owner and ask nicely. :-)
I ment that we can't take it down, and detractors are going to find a way to replicate this even if it didn't exist.
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And the membership of this forum crossed 10K months ago, but there is no chance that the ownership of this forum is going to start counting IP addresses. That wouldn't be any more relevant a metric anyway. Not only do not all members run their own client, much less one full time; there are many more people who use bitcoin who don't have memberships.
of course, but one can guess-estimate the number of non-forum members; just like radio stations estimate listeners from request phone calls... and is really the derivative that matters not the value anyway.
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Again, the growth or decline of the number of listening-but-not-mining clients is irrelevent to the function or resilence of the bitcoin network whether they are on the open Internet or some PVN. Beyond some minimum number required to support the bandwidth of the network as a whole, that is. The very fact that we can't know how many (or where are) all the network's nodes happen to exist is, itself, a contribution to it's resiliance. An attacker can DOS the pools or exchanges, because he can find out it's IP address and a government agent can steal a server because he can find the farm that holds it; but these things cannot stop the bitcoin network for no other reason that you cannot kill what you cannot catch. At worst, these kinds of events simply disrupt the network temporaroly and force more users towards Tor and I2P.
I'm not worried about technical disruption of bitcoin but social -- after all there still aren't many merchants accepting it. BTC could just fade away... statistics showing a growing user base would convince merchants to offer it as a payment mechanism. You are right, the inability to fully count/control the members is a great strength which is why I said "approximate numbers". Hard numbers would be great, but if those are not available, it would still be useful to have the same kind of partly-fabricated numbers that businesses have used since the beginning of... well the beginning of VCs probably... to justify their business model.
Whatever will be will be.