Topic: Total Number of full nodes operating. Less than 10k. - page 4. (Read 1195 times)

That was a period in time before mining centralisation and ASICs so there would've been thousands of people with small mining rigs. That's why ETH has more nodes of that nature than BTC these days.

These days Bitcoin nodes will either be industrial mining operations, exchanges or other services that need a full node or enthusiasts.

Probably due to to the increase of blockchain size since 2012...

I believe the key to increasing and diversifying the number of Full Nodes is exactly the adoption. But not just curious users. We need more companies using Bitcoin and to increase confidence in the project it would be natural for them to opt for a full node as well.

How many people in the world do you know about bitcoin, in the current situation, as the number of hacked bitcoin hackers operating underground undergoes bitcoin security controls, causing many to go bankrupt and lose their trust? believe in bitcoin. The above number can still increase if we are the true investors and expect bitcoin will set out some solutions for bitcoin hacking problem.

Only after falling a lot.  E.g. on Jan 3rd 2012 there were over 16500 listening nodes tracked by sipa's seeder.

The number has definitively increased a lot, because in mid-2017 we had about 6000-7000 (from those that were visible on the earn.com website). I was actively following the big "Segwit debate" then, that's why I remember that number relatively well.

However, I don't think the current number is a problem. Full nodes are definitively important. But it's not important to have millions or even hundreds of thousands. Remember that validation work is mainly done by miners, and in simple terms non-mining full nodes become important mainly if there is something wrong with their work - apart from their importance for (bigger) users themselves, as they are more secure against some kinds of attacks.

From what I think to know as a non-programmer having read many forum threads and some other articles about that topic, it's important that there are enough nodes with some economic "weight" to work as a backup of the blockchain if a mining cartel attacks the chain. For example, if miners wanted to steal coins from Segwit addresses using a custom upgrade going back to old rules, full nodes could refuse to accept these transactions, and if there are no exchanges between the attackers, then the miners wouldn't have anyone to sell their stolen coins to (and the mined coins on their forked chain, so their loss would be even bigger).

From this point of view, it's mostly important that exchanges and (bigger) merchants run full nodes, to avoid being scammed with these worthless "non-consensus-obeying" coins.

It also helps if nodes are relatively well distributed, but it's probably enough that we have three big "centres" (oversimplified, the US, the EU and Eastern Asia) and some other small regional "hubs" so no government action or anther regional catastrophic event could shut the network down, and "regional sybil/hashrate attacks" cannot lure some nodes into accepting 1-conf transactions which will later be double spent.

Most people after a couple of minutes of googling will be utterly turned off by the idea of running a full node, especially as there are ever more options that don't require you to ever go near the raw blockchain. Not many have that much hdd space to play with or spare bandwidth.

Throw in the lack of financial incentive and it's a slam dunk. Obviously there's a security incentive but it's human nature to let someone else do the heavy lifting until it bites you in the arse.

That current figure is pretty healthy compared to the past.

https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/?days=730

There are many more full nodes running, that page only lists ones that accept inbound connections.

Estimates put the number at about 84,000 although a significant number of nodes are spy node run only for the purpose of tracing transactions though we don't know how many.  In the past there was a higher rate of node running relative to the user base but the resources required to run a node increased substantially along with many other factors.

Listening node count was higher in the past; but UPNP being disabled by default due to repeated security problems with it, increased listening specific resource usage, and other factors have decreased the count even in absolute terms.

I just discovered this website:
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes

There are only 9624 full nodes operating right now.
I had no idea that the number was so low.

How many people know about bitcoin? There are millions of coinbase/bitstamp/bitfinex/binance/etc accounts!!

How come only less than 10 thousand people in the whole world decided to run a full node?
Near 25% of the network is in the US, with 2322 full nodes operating

Few months ago I decided to run a full node...  It was like an experiment.

Unfortunately, I had to give up, because my old 2010 notebook could not handle 200Gb of space.
I would have to delete some personal stuff, and as it was just and experiment, it was easier to just give up the idea.

Then, I looked at this website, how many people are running a full node in Brazil:
https://bitnodes.earn.com/nodes/?q=Brazil
Only 34...

Running full nodes is important so that more people are contributing to the decentralization of the network, validating transactions.

Don't you guys think this number is too low? I know that probably the number is increasing over the years, but I was quite impressed with that number.
People talk a lot about total hash power, but isn't that number very important as well?