<h2>Scalability context</h2>
<p>So far as I can tell, most scholarly articles on Bitcoin scalability focus on the upper limits to transactions per second. This seems to be of greater concern than upper bounds to number of nodes.</p>
<p>Another issue that seems to occupy more attention is the size of the blockchain data that every full node must store and process. See &quot;sharding&quot; etc.</p>
<h2>Max nodes</h2>
<p>Putting aside Internet bandwidth etc. One limit to number of nodes would be that if the latency of the gossip protocol across the whole network is near or above the ten-minute block interval, it would presumably be likely that the network would naturally split. I suppose an indicator of the approach to this might be an accelerating  increase in the number of small scale reorgs.</p>
<p>Since any node only needs to communicate with a handful of &quot;nearby&quot; nodes, I imagine this issue depends largely on the maximum number of hops between any two nodes (or significant groups of nodes) where one hop is one Bitcoin node communicating with another Bitcoin node (each is invariable many IP routing hops, different use of the word hop)</p>
<p>I think this is probably related to the concept of <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22version-age%22+in+a+network" rel="nofollow noreferrer">&quot;version-age&quot; of information in a gossip network</a>. There are many articles on this more general issue (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.02893" rel="nofollow noreferrer">e.g.</a>)</p>
<p>Data throughput is probably less of a constraint on number of nodes since the data throughput for any synchronised node is independent of network size. Around 4 MB per 10 minutes plus overheads. Less for SPV nodes, which might form a majority in a large network.</p>
<p>You will note the above is speculation and unquantified.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2024-11-20T18:31:44.930Z
2024-11-20T18:43:03.173Z
2024-11-20T18:43:03.173Z
RedGrittyBrick
<p>Current estimates for the number of active Bitcoin nodes range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. However, is there a practical limit to how many nodes the network can support, other than the bandwidth of the Internet itself? Could every person in the world run a full node?</p>
<p>Inspired by this tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1858587084719579171" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1858587084719579171</a></p>

<network><nodes><scalability><bandwidth>
Could the Bitcoin network support billions of nodes?
Vojtěch Strnad
# Could the Bitcoin network support billions of nodes?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2024-11-19)

Current estimates for the number of active Bitcoin nodes range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. However, is there a practical limit to how many nodes the network can support, other than the bandwidth of the Internet itself? Could every person in the world run a full node?

Inspired by this tweet: <https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1858587084719579171>

**Tags:** network, nodes, scalability, bandwidth


---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2024-11-20. Score: 0

## Scalability context

So far as I can tell, most scholarly articles on Bitcoin scalability focus on the upper limits to transactions per second. This seems to be of greater concern than upper bounds to number of nodes.

Another issue that seems to occupy more attention is the size of the blockchain data that every full node must store and process. See "sharding" etc.

## Max nodes

Putting aside Internet bandwidth etc. One limit to number of nodes would be that if the latency of the gossip protocol across the whole network is near or above the ten-minute block interval, it would presumably be likely that the network would naturally split. I suppose an indicator of the approach to this might be an accelerating increase in the number of small scale reorgs.

Since any node only needs to communicate with a handful of "nearby" nodes, I imagine this issue depends largely on the maximum number of hops between any two nodes (or significant groups of nodes) where one hop is one Bitcoin node communicating with another Bitcoin node (each is invariable many IP routing hops, different use of the word hop)

I think this is probably related to the concept of ["version-age" of information in a gossip network](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22version-age%22+in+a+network). There are many articles on this more general issue ([e.g.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.02893))

Data throughput is probably less of a constraint on number of nodes since the data throughput for any synchronised node is independent of network size. Around 4 MB per 10 minutes plus overheads. Less for SPV nodes, which might form a majority in a large network.

You will note the above is speculation and unquantified.


---

