Bitcoin full nodes exceed 15,000, and the new version is getting faster and faster

Overnight Bitcoin (BTC) stabilized at 39k, waiting for an opportunity to move, but not moving. Many people care about data, but they care about the wrong data. Most of the various technical indicators and charts that are based on historical prices are mostly calculated by some formula. These so-called technical indicators are actually lagging indicators of prices, and theoretically they are not enough to predict the future. Unless it assumes that there is some observable continuity in price fluctuations, but in fact, we have never observed this. (See "All technical indicators are lagging indicators" on 2021/6/19)

Let us pay more attention to intrinsic indicators.

As we all know, Bitcoin has three main forces that check and balance each other: developers, who are responsible for maintaining the code, which determines the rules; miners, who are responsible for producing blocks according to the rules and verifying transactions; and users, who are responsible for using the system and setting prices for Bitcoin.

The final deciding factor is definitely the users. If the system is not really useful, then the users will vote with their feet and leave the system. No matter how much the system is developed or mined, it will be useless if the users are lost.

The indicators for measuring this part are naturally the number of users, the number of wallet addresses that store coins, the number of active wallet addresses, the balance distribution of wallet addresses, etc.

An increase in the number of Bitcoin users will increase the value of the network, push up prices, and attract more people to try Bitcoin, forming a positive feedback loop. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in a blog post on February 18, 2009: "In this sense, (Bitcoin) is a more typical precious metal. The supply is predetermined and the value changes, rather than changing the supply to keep the value stable. As the number of users increases, the value of each coin increases. It has the potential to form a positive feedback loop. As the number of users increases, the value will rise, which may attract more users to take advantage of the growing value to profit." (See "Self-Limitation and Reflexivity" on April 2, 2021)

Users determine value, value determines price, and price determines computing power.

Miners seem to be the most powerful part of the entire system. They are responsible for providing computing power. They think so themselves. They think they have the "gun" of the Bitcoin system, so some so-called "mining tyrants" try to launch an armed coup (seize control of the code) or split (hard fork), but this has been falsified by history since 2017. (See "Centralization Against the Current" on May 15, 2021)

An effective democratic republic system must be able to effectively achieve two things: first, control the use of force and govern it with culture; second, control capital and make wealth distribution more even rather than concentrated and polarized. Otherwise, the system will tend to collapse.

Miners dance to the baton of price. It is the price that determines the computing power, not the computing power that determines the price. Regarding this point, Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out as early as February 21, 2010 in his forum speech: "The price of any commodity tends to the production cost. If the price is lower than the cost, then production will slow down. If the price is higher than the cost, you can make a profit by producing and selling more products. At the same time, the increased production capacity (computing power) will increase the difficulty and push the production cost to the price." "In the next few years, when the new coins generated only account for a small part of the existing total supply, the market price will determine the production cost, not the other way around." (See "How does Bitcoin adapt to the impact of a sudden drop in computing power?" on June 21, 2021)

But people often overlook an important part of the Bitcoin system - the full node.

The full node is the guardian of the Bitcoin ledger, the foothold for users to access the Bitcoin network, the arbiter of the validity of blocks produced by miners, the runner of the code developed by developers, and the executor of the rules defined by the code.

What is commendable is that the development of full nodes is almost always value-driven, not price-driven. There is no direct economic reward for running a full node, so full nodes are usually run for non-economic reasons.

The developers of Bitcoin Core have worked hard for many years to make it possible for most ordinary computers to run a full node with complete ledger data. It cannot be overstated. Just look at the state explosion of Ethereum, so that few people can run an archive node with full state today (not to mention the centralized "monster" Infura has almost turned Ethereum into a decentralized network in a centralized shell), or look at the various public chains that have simply given up and taken the centralized revisionist route and adopted the "super node architecture", and you will know how Bitcoin's insistence on full node decentralization is superior to others.

Over the past decade, countless lunatics and madmen have claimed that "Bitcoin's backward technology will definitely be surpassed." Over the past decade, no one has surpassed it, and many have reversed. Their constant claims of "surpassing Bitcoin" are nothing more than dreams and lies made up to fool countless young people.

Today, there are more than 15,000 Bitcoin full nodes that can be detected worldwide[1], an increase of more than 50% from the 10,000 during the previous bear market (Figure 1).

(Figure 1: 5-year data on the number of Bitcoin full nodes)

More importantly, since the beginning of 2020, the number of full nodes using the onion network has increased rapidly, and has now exceeded half (Figure 1). This has also directly led to the geographical distribution of full nodes, with full nodes in unknown regions accounting for more than 50%, followed by the United States (12.9%), other countries or regions (12.8%), Germany (11.6%), and other countries and regions with a share of less than 10% (Figure 2).

(Figure 2: Distribution of Bitcoin full nodes by country or region)

The ledger is the kindling of fire. As long as the ledger exists, Bitcoin will not die. I am afraid that few other blockchains can provide services incognito except Bitcoin's full node.

This is just the full nodes that can be detected. What about those full nodes that are hidden behind various NAT networks and are not detected? It is almost impossible to completely destroy all Bitcoin nodes, destroy the distributed ledger, and destroy Bitcoin, right?

Moreover, in order to make full nodes easier to run, and the ledger easier to save, copy and spread faster, Bitcoin core developers have been working hard to optimize and increase the speed of Bitcoin ledger downloads.

In response to this, developer and contributor Jameson Lopp conducted an interesting experiment[2]. From the experimental data, it can be seen that the synchronization performance of Bitcoin full nodes continues to improve as the Bitcoin client version increases (Figure 3).

(Figure 3: Comparison of data synchronization speeds of various versions of Bitcoin ledgers)

This is the continuous optimization of improving Bitcoin's decentralization capabilities.

As for other so-called public chains, their energy is probably focused on developing more applications, increasing lock-up, and speculating on the prices in the secondary market.

You reap what you sow. If you focus on hype, you will get hype results. If you focus on optimizing performance, you will get a more decentralized Bitcoin.

Ultimately, we are not pursuing infinitely decentralized Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto has also discussed this. In a forum post on May 18, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: "I don't expect there will be more than 100,000 nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it is not worth having any more nodes. The rest will be lightweight clients, possibly millions."