For the simulation, it’s also important to know how frequently connections to Bitprojects ( Many connections to bitproject.io nodes? - #19 by b10c ) were attempted and how often they succeeded. If, for example, all attempted connections to Bitprojects succeeded, then we can assume that once we picked a Bitprojects address from our address manager, we also made a connection to it.
In the final months before it was shut down, Bitprojects was using 12x /24 IPv4 ranges with each of these 3072 IPs having some kind of reachable Bitcoin node behind it. My nodes first started making connections to it in mid July 2024. This grew to about 0.75 outbound connections per hour per node in April 2025. In October 2025, this started to increase and by January 2026, some of my nodes were making 2 outbound connections per hour to Bitprojects IPs. But how many of these connections were successful?
When Bitprojects initially started in mid 2024, connectivity to it wasn’t good. Until early 2025, usually less than half of the connections my nodes attempted to Bitprojects succeeded. This changed in early 2025. Then, nearly all connections succeeded. There still was some downtime here and there, but for many of my nodes, there were multiple weeks with high success rates. Around October 2025, connectivity dropped nearly completely, which is likely related to the clock misconfiguration Antoine discusses in Antoine Poinsot - Misbehaving nodes investigation and the Bitprojects maintainer pausing and then re-enabling the nodes. From then on, connectivity remained very high until the nodes were stopped at the end of March 2026.
While Bitprojects used 12x /24 IPv4 subnets at the end, they started with the first /24 in mind July 2024. In October, November, and December 2024, they added three more /24’s. In October 2025, they added eight more /24’s.
