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266 sats \ 1 reply \ @DiedOnTitan 20 Dec \ on: Bitcoin vs the World: how big is btc's network compared to other large networks? bitcoin
Thanks for sharing the thought provoking summary of the world's largest man made networks. One possible inclusion would be the SWIFT network which includes 11,000 financial institutions. source
oh, very cool idea! You reminded me that I could include several industries that have global branches:
- All couriers (Fedex/UPS/post offices)
- The banking system (all branches)
- All fast food franchises (McDonald's/Subway)
- All gas stations (this is really just another type of node on the highway network, but it's probably a better metric for how large the freeway system is than just counting all major cities)
Someone else reminded me that I should have included bittorrent, and after looking up bittorrent stats I found it's bigger than all the other networks by several orders of magnitude: over 126,000,000 bittorrent users run the equivalent of a bittorrent node. And you might think "but almost all of those are just users, they aren't transmitting other people's messages" -- you'd be wrong because they are!
That's one of the brilliant things about bittorrent. The standard clients support a feature whereby, if you are downloading a file, you also automatically share the parts you've already downloaded to anyone who requests them. Brilliant! It turns "normal users" into "node runners" by default. I want to do something like that in bitcoin too. (Just have to think of an equivalent thing to do. Maybe a block explorer where, if you look up a block, you also start sharing that block data with other users of the block explorer, if they request it.)
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