I scanned publicly reachable Bitcoin nodes with nmap -O and aggregated the detected operating system as Linux, Windows, BSD, macOS, Other/Device, or Unknown.
Latest scan (2026-07-07): 16,662 IPv4/IPv6 targets
Reachable: 10,625 (63.8%)
Unreachable: 6,037 (36.2%)
OS classification among reachable hosts (n = 10,625):
Linux: 6,653 (62.6%)
Unknown: 2,852 (26.8%)
Windows: 453 (4.3%)
Other/Device: 370 (3.5%)
BSD: 194 (1.8%)
macOS: 95 (0.9%)
Other: 6 (0.1%)
Solaris: 2 (0%)
Repository with the CSVs, scripts, caveats and full methodology. I plan to monthly scan and update this repo with new data:
Scans publicly reachable Bitcoin nodes with nmap -O to guess their operating system
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b10c
July 8, 2026, 11:00am
2
Thanks for posting!
In Implement more extractors · Issue #141 · peer-observer/peer-observer · GitHub , I had a brief look at the Windows IPs. I thought many of these were probably hosted at Azure, but it turns out, many of them are actually on an ISP, not hosted. Here’s a quick and dirty overview .
Feel free to continue posting the monthly updates here too.
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b10c
July 8, 2026, 11:10am
3
I had a look at my peer-observer node IPs in this data:
Most of them are correctly identified as Linux
Two of them are marked as Unknown. I think these have a stricter firewall on the hoster side
One of them is marked as Other/Device, but it also sits behind a stricter firewall
If someone is running a node on Windows, it would be interesting to look it up in the CSV and report if it’s correctly identified.
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