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265 sats \ 0 replies \ @supertestnet OP 20 Dec \ parent \ on: Bitcoin vs the World: how big is btc's network compared to other large networks? bitcoin
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.)