Bitcoin Sees New All-Time High In Node Numbers

Bitcoin Nodes Have reached a brand new all-time high in terms of numbers, clocking in at 11,627 reachable nodes currently active at the time of writing and according to Bitnodes.io.

Coin.dance stands as another Bitcoin network statistics tracker, and has crunched its numbers to conclude a total of 11478 nodes on the network. Either way, this is far above the previous all-time high set a year ago in this month, having been recorded at 11.250 nodes back in January of 2020.

Bitcoin Core’s Latest Version Up For Grabs

It was the 14th of January, 2021, when Bitcoin Core’s new update 0.21.0 was released to the public. As it stands now, Bitcoin Core stands as the fourth most-used software among these nodes. In particular, a total of 619 nodes are dedicated to the latest version of this software, which is only 5.5% of the total Bitcoin Core nodes within the network.

Of these nodes, close to 5,000 of these Bitcoin Core nodes operate with Bitcoin Core 0.20.1, which stands as the version prior to the new update, and seems to keep its rampant popularity.

With Bitcoin Core’s latest version, a method was introduced in order to help create testnets with higher predictability. Alongside this, Bitcoin Core implements the consensus rules of Taproot, all the while not activating it within the main net, as well.

Privacy Is King For Latest Update

These changes to Bitcoin Core will ultimately lead to higher privacy levels within Bitcoin transaction. This is primarily thanks to how Taproot ensures that spending conditions are no longer revealed by outputs, which had needlessly exposed users in the previous versions.

Bitcoin could see itself become a more fungible asset thanks to the removal of transactions’ differentiating features, which will run closer in line with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original proposal for Bitcoin: Digital Cash. One must wonder how the creator of Bitcoin must feel, seeing institutions hoard it like digital gold, instead.

Another important thing to consider is that up to 25% of all Bitcoin nodes available may be running using the Tor hidden network. As such, Bitcoin Core 0.21.0’s Tor Version 3’s hidden services compatibility upgrade is paramount to its success. This is due to how the hidden services of version 2 will deprecate come later this year.

Nodes Managed By The People For The People

Satoshi Nakamoto has concluded that Bitcoin’s success rests squarely on a sizable volume of nodes within the system that are independently operated. This is due to the fundamental value of the network has always been decentralization.

Bitcoin Core, formerly known as Bitcoin-QT, stands as a software client that Wladimir J. Van Der Laan had developed. The software itself is based on reference code written by Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. As one would imagine, Bitcoin Core stands as the most popular implementation of Bitcoin’s protocol, with a total of 98.5% of nodes operating on some version of it.