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Bitcoin has only 8 active connections, and I read somewhere that it helps to forward ports. I know how to forward a port, but which port should I forward, and how should I tell Bitcoin-qt to use the forwarded port?
Port forwarding plus Bitcoin
Answers
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Bitcoin has only 8 active connections
Correction: it has 8 outbound connections. By default, it can also accept up to 117 inbound connections
which port
Port 8333, TCP
how should I tell Bitcoin-qt to use the forwarded port?
Don't need to.
OK, so does forwarding the port increase the number of outbound connections? – BenjiWiebe – 2013-02-20T20:01:49.850
No, but it makes it possible to get inbound connections, which helps the network. – Nick ODell – 2013-02-20T20:02:50.400
So why does Bitcoin-qt only have 8 outbound connections? Is there any way to increase this? – BenjiWiebe – 2013-02-20T20:05:56.147
1 Yes, go into the source code and modify MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS, then recompile.
No .conf file setting to change? – BenjiWiebe – 2013-02-20T20:14:24.663
There's maxconnections, but that's the total connections. – Nick ODell – 2013-02-20T20:15:49.207
Obviously not; it is a const. @Nick ODell Thanks! I'll modify the source! (I built it from source anyhow.) – BenjiWiebe – 2013-02-20T20:15:50.330
1Incidentally, adding more than 8 outbound connections doesn't necessarily help you ... it can actually put additional work for your system and consume inbound connections elsewhere that others might have used instead. – Stephen Gornick – 2013-02-20T22:09:04.953
@StephenGornick I noticed that, when I edited the source code to allow more connections, it actually went slower. – BenjiWiebe – 2013-02-21T00:40:36.820
8 connections is more than enough for your client to pull blocks from the bitcoin network. So adding more doesn't help you, at least not directly. But it does help the bitcoin network if your node is accessible to others. – Stephen Gornick – 2013-02-20T22:07:07.463