There were more nodes participating in the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain than on the Bitcoin (BTC) network for a brief period at the start of the week. This news comes amid the imminent launch of ETH 2.0.
Bitcoin Regains Lead over Ethereum in Number of Nodes
Tweeting on Sunday (Nov. 29, 2020) Austrian blockchain outfit Bitfly compared data from network node aggregators to show that the Ethereum chain contained more nodes than its Bitcoin counterpart for the first time ever. At the time, Ethereum had 156 more nodes than Bitcoin based on data from the two sources.
However, as of press time, Bitcoin is back ahead of Ethereum in terms of node count. Data from Bitnodes.io puts the Bitcoin network node count at 11,383 while figures from Ethernodes.org have the total number of nodes on Ethereum at 11,161 nodes.
At the time of Bitfly’s tweet, some commentators pointed out that the Bitnodes data was not a full reflection of the Bitcoin node count. Indeed, some alluded to the figures not accounting for listening nodes.
On the flip side, some Ethereum proponents were quick to point out the democratic distribution of nodes on the chain, with one ETH advocate stating:
“Greater amount of residential Ethereum nodes too (not using a hosting company). Bit odd how a high majority of BTC nodes are using Tor. I’d assume many of those Tor nodes are also counted as normal ipv4 and almost all of them are using a hosting company.“
Some ETH critics also pointed out that unlike the Bitcoin node containing only full nodes that hold a complete archival history of the blockchain, the same cannot be said for Ethereum. Indeed, the number of actual full nodes on the Ethereum chain has been a subject of debate on multiple occasions.
As previously reported by BTCManager, a blackout on the popular ETH hosted node cluster Infura caused a chain split on the Ethereum network affecting exchanges and miners alike. Indeed, some platforms had to pause withdrawals while the issue was being resolved.
Back in Mar. 2019, BTCManager reported that Bitcoin hosted over half of all Bitcoin nodes. According to data from Bitnodes, this figure now stands at about 17%. Node implementation services like Utreexo now allow for easier access to would-be participants of the Bitcoin node setup.
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