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 problem 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 on.
Max nodes
Placing apart Web bandwidth and so on. One restrict to variety of nodes could 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 break up. I suppose an indicator of the method to this could be an accelerating enhance 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 problem 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, completely 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 common problem (eg)
Information throughput might be much less of a constraint on variety of nodes for the reason that knowledge throughput for any synchronised node is unbiased of community measurement. 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 concept and unquantified.
