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 larger concern than higher bounds to variety of nodes.
One other challenge that appears to occupy extra consideration is the dimensions of the blockchain knowledge 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 possible that the community would naturally break up. I suppose an indicator of the strategy to this is likely to 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 important teams of nodes) the place one hop is one Bitcoin node speaking with one other Bitcoin node (every is invariable many IP routing hops, totally different use of the phrase hop)
I feel that is in all probability associated to the idea of “version-age” of data in a gossip community. There are lots of articles on this extra normal challenge (e.g.)
Information throughput might be much less of a constraint on variety of nodes because the knowledge 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 be aware the above is concept and unquantified.
