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How big is the Bitcoin network in terms of total number of computers (peers, clients) that are connected together? Are there any network statistics or historical size data available?
How big is the Bitcoin network?
Answers
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My current real-time estimate using https://github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes is 8000 to 10000 nodes that are reachable at any one time with churn rate of 300 to 500 nodes every 5 minutes. The churn could be due to several factors, e.g.
- Node went offline
- Node reached max. allowed connections
- Time of day, e.g. more nodes are online during US working hours
- Network errors
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There is no definitive answer because the network changes as nodes connect and disconnect. Blockchain.info maintains some statistics that might help you. Try going here to get a list of nodes that have connected recently. This still won't tell you the total number of nodes in the network, but it gives you an idea. They also maintain a list of nodes that have been contacted over the past 48 hours.
Thanks for your answer. I checked at http://getaddr.bitnodes.io and today's measurement was about 158,000 nodes. I thought these are the unique nodes the script was able to connect to in a given time period. Is this true? Does the high "churn rate" play a big role here? How many of the network nodes are connected in long term? Is it the 8-10k?
– Kozuch – 2013-12-26T21:25:03.630Also, I found this list (warning - a 64 MB .txt file) - http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/seeds.txt - it lists 400k+ IPs with probabilities of the node being seen in various time intervals (from 2 hours till 30 days).
– Kozuch – 2013-12-26T21:39:50.6531The public data on getaddr.bitnodes.io is based on the first generation crawler (bitnodes.py) from the same GitHub repo. It shows nodes that ever came online in the last 30 days. – bitnodes – 2013-12-27T06:04:45.253
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The seeds.txt with 400k IPs is being updated continuously (appended) using https://github.com/sipa/bitcoin-seeder.
– bitnodes – 2013-12-27T06:08:07.250