Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Why are we bleeding nodes?

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 14:26:40 +0200

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Jameson Lopp <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one concerned about the consistent dropping of nodes. Though I think that the fundamental question should be: how many nodes do we really need? Obviously more is better, but it's difficult to say how concerned we should be without more information. I posted my thoughts last month: http://coinchomp.com/2014/03/19/bitcoin-nodes-many-enough/

In my opinion, the number of full nodes doesn't matter (as long as
it's enough to satisfy demand by other nodes).

What matters is how hard it is to run one. If someone is interesting
in verifying that nobody is cheating on the network, can they, and can
they without significant investment? Whether they actually will
depends also no how interesting the currency and its digital transfers
are.

> On 04/07/2014 07:34 AM, Mike Hearn wrote:
>> At the start of February we had 10,000 bitcoin nodes. Now we have 8,500 and
>> still falling:
>>
>>    http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/dashboard/chart/?days=60

My own network crawler (which feeds my DNS seeder) hasn't seen any
significant drop that I remember, but I don't have actual logs. It's
seeing around 6000 "well reachable nodes" currently, which is the
highest number I've ever seen (though it's been around 6000 for quite
a while now).

-- 
Pieter