Quote from: coins101 on June 18, 2015, 03:04:39 PM

I'm doing some research on Bitcoin nodes and how to increase their numbers.

As part of that I thought I had better get some reference points. These are the results:

http://i.imgur.com/nYfPo7j.jpg

Q1. Can the numbers indicating that there were over 370k nodes be trusted?

Q2. Why was there such a sharp fall in numbers? GPU and then ASICs?

Q3. Is is possible to ever see that number again?

Source for 370k number was worked out from:

Quote from: klaus on May 19, 2013, 04:32:08 AM

http://bitnodes.io

Wow, wir sind nach China und USA No 3 in der Welt, stärker als Russland und Kanada. Nochmal WOW !

Sehr stolz der junge Skywalker nun seien ...

http://i.imgur.com/YaO5OYY.gif

edit

BTC user disclosure runs Bitnodes, the source of the above data. He has answered the questions:

Quote from: disclosure on June 18, 2015, 10:11:12 PM

The early December 2013 network snapshots, i.e. with over 100k nodes, are not valid as the crawler at that time took several hours just to complete one full network snapshot and it includes all nodes from addr responses which can be faked or likely stale. Those snapshots were linked to from getaddr.bitnodes.io/SNAPSHOT_NUMBER/ which have been removed since.

With the new crawler released in late Dec 2013, the crawl time was brought down significantly down to sub 5 minutes with considerably good churn rate. I use the churn rate to measure how good a network snapshot is. A value of 0 implies the network snapshot was taken instantly but of course that's not possible. At the moment, we are seeing a typical churn rate of 30+: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/

I would think killing GPU mining would have severely dropped the node count. I fear for all of these multi-million dollar farms out there that are literally going belly up as soon as the block reward drops again Roll Eyes