A quarter of global Bitcoin nodes controlled by these countries
Bitcoin, still the cryptocurrency to beat in terms of market cap, has made great strides towards its quest for mass adoption.
Gaining legal tender status in El Salvador is the biggest yet for the asset dubbed “digital gold” and “the future of money.”
As the virgin crypto and its developers continue their efforts to convince more people and institutions to invest in and use the asset, it is appropriate to take a short break and learn a thing or two about it, other than its price and market cap.
Since the peer-to-peer (P2) network plays an important role in mining, investors, especially new ones, may want to know which countries have the most Bitcoin nodes still open for connections.
The US hosts the most accessible BTC nodes
In accordance data shared by research firm Bitnodes, 30% of all available nodes in the world are located in five countries.
These are the USA, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Canada.
The US houses 1,844 nodes (13.2%) while Germany comes next with its 1,362 (9.8%) numbers. Rounding up are France with 434 (3.1%), the Netherlands with 374 (2.7%) and Canada with 297 (2.1%).
A Bitcoin node is any computer that stores the entire blockchain and runs BTC implementation, validating each block and transaction before being added to the network.
Image: InvestNews
These are important as they act as “umpires” within the system, enforcing “rules” to determine which transactions are valid or invalid.
There are two types of nodes – unavailable and accessible. Those that can be connected directly or are not yet full in terms of allowed connections are classified as accessible.
These nodes consist of what is known as peer to peer (P2P) Network that collectively store and share files.
There is no data on How many Bitcoin nodes actually exist right now, but in August 2022, Bitstamp reported that there are over 10,000 available nodes scattered around the world. Other reports suggest that there are more than 15,000 of these computing devices with such a specific purpose.
There can be multiple nodes
It is over 5 billion people from different countries who have access to the internet. But unfortunately, not even a fraction of this number is involved in running a Bitcoin node which according to experts can be easily done.
One of the minimum requirements to run a node is to have a device with at least 7 GB of storage space to spare. It is enough for truncated validation that is already contributing to the decentralization of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Running nodes, as opposed to actually mining the cryptocurrency, is not power intensive as it only uses around 10 cents of power per day.
It would be amazing to see how Bitcoin will benefit if the number of reachable nodes in the peer-to-peer network reaches just one million.
For now, the BTC blockchain has to make do with a few tens of thousands currently running.
BTC total market cap at $370 billion on the daily chart | Featured image from Forex Academy, Chart: TradingView.com
