majority of btc nodes run on tor network

· butter's blog


i was waiting for my btc txn to confirm so i thought why not check the status on btc nodes.

first, i found this dos vulnerability which could have fucked the entire network very easily. luckily, it's fixed now (except 13% nodes are still affected)

alr so i visited bitnodes.io which tracks every single node on bitcoin network. it's awesome.

ok so they have a nice api. i took the latest snapshot timestamp:

curl -H "Accept: application/json; indent=4" https://bitnodes.io/api/v1/snapshots/ | jq '.results[0]'

{
  "url": "https://bitnodes.io/api/v1/snapshots/1730291084/",
  "timestamp": 1730291084,
  "total_nodes": 19339,
  "latest_height": 868086
}

total nodes are currently 19339.

let's grep "tor network" field:

curl -H "Accept: application/json; indent=4" https://bitnodes.io/api/v1/snapshots/1730290492/ | jq '.nodes[] | .[-1]' | grep "Tor network" | wc -l

12075

so that's more than 60% of the nodes running on tor, which means btc network is highly dependent on tor to be stable enough.

currently, we have around ~8000 tor relays running which is serving 2 million monthly users.

that number of relays are too low for serving so many users and blockchain networks. so please, run a relay if you can.