Scalability context

As far as I can inform, most scholarly articles on Bitcoin scalability give attention to the higher limits to transactions per second. This appears to be of better concern than higher bounds to variety of nodes.

One other challenge that appears to occupy extra consideration is the scale of the blockchain information that each full node should retailer and course of. See “sharding” and so forth.

Max nodes

Placing apart Web bandwidth and so forth. One restrict to variety of nodes can be that if the latency of the gossip protocol throughout the entire community is close to or above the ten-minute block interval, it could presumably be doubtless that the community would naturally cut up. I suppose an indicator of the strategy to this may be an accelerating improve within the variety of small scale reorgs.

Since any node solely wants to speak with a handful of “close by” nodes, I think about this challenge relies upon largely on the utmost variety of hops between any two nodes (or vital teams of nodes) the place one hop is one Bitcoin node speaking with one other Bitcoin node (every is invariable many IP routing hops, completely different use of the phrase hop)

I believe that is in all probability associated to the idea of “version-age” of data in a gossip community. There are various articles on this extra common challenge (e.g.)

Knowledge throughput might be much less of a constraint on variety of nodes for the reason that information throughput for any synchronised node is unbiased of community dimension. Round 4 MB per 10 minutes plus overheads. Much less for SPV nodes, which could kind a majority in a big community.

You’ll observe the above is theory and unquantified.