As the rhetoric and threats of a contentious hardfork (a split in the Bitcoin network) ramped up within the Bitcoin community in the days following the discovery of a critical bug in the Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) client, which temporarily brought down more than 400 BU nodes, the number of nodes supporting Bitcoin Core (BC) has climbed rapidly over the last few days.
The bitter scaling debate has prompted many pro-BC members of the community to fire up Full Nodes, which perform the tasks of verifying transactions and blocks on the Bitcoin network.
But these special servers also consume excessive amounts of upload bandwidth due to the ever-increasing size of Bitcoin's blockchain, and node operators open themselves up to DDoS and hacking attacks.
However, the inherent dangers of running a Full Bitcoin Node are being brushed aside by an increasing number of enthusiasts as the likelihood of a Bitcoin split ratcheted up to new highs in mid-March.
Since the start of this week, approximately 660 new BC nodes have come online, bringing the total amount of Bitcoin Core nodes to 5947 (83.37% of all nodes) on Friday, according to data compiled by Coin.dance.
The last time the Bitcoin network had so many BC nodes was on the 14th of August, 2015.
Bitcoin Unlimited node counts, which dipped from 764 to 410 on Tuesday, have also climbed to an all-time high of 813 on Friday.
Server photo by Bob Mical
