Another monitoring website, Coin.Dance, reports that Bitcoin’s node count has achieved a historic high of 12,825. The count of nodes running the Bitcoin Core software is 98.77%, with the rest spread between less prominent variants such as Bitcore and Bitcoin Knots.
Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 was published in May with a Taproot activation code, and it is now the most widely used variant of the software amongst entities running accessible nodes, with nearly 5,000 nodes (as per Coin.Dance). According to Bitnodes, the number is 5,125, accounting for 40% of the overall network nodes.
According to Bitnodes’ statistics, Tor is used by over 50% of the network nodes. Only around 25% of all accessible nodes were using the secret network Tor in January. Because the IP addresses of connected nodes are obscured, running a client such as Bitcoin Core over Tor adds an extra degree of anonymity.
The network node number has risen by 2,739 nodes in 2020, as per Bitnodes statistics, supporting Bitcoin’s decentralized ethos. The increase in network node number is similar to the present rapid growth of the Lightning Network ecosystem, where capability has increased by more than 70% in a matter of six months.
After including 100 Bitcoin (BTC) within a week, public Lightning Network capacity surpassed 1,800 BTC earlier this month. According to Bitcoin Visuals’ Lightning Network data monitor, the count of LN nodes has surpassed 12,800 and it is an all-time record.