The world of bitcoin is always full of surprises, and this day will not be different. The number of Bitcoin Unlimited nodes on the network took a serious nosedive, albeit no one seems to know for sure what is going on. As of right now, there are only 191 Bitcoin Unlimited nodes remaining, whereas there used to be over 725 just a few weeks ago.
Are People Giving Up On Bitcoin Unlimited?
It is not the first time there is a spontaneous dip in the number of Bitcoin Unlimited nodes, though. A few weeks ago, a major flaw in the project’s source code was discovered. This bug allowed unknown assailants to execute a DDoS attack against some nodes, knocking them offline for a few hours. That situation was recited rather quickly, though, and everything seemed to be going well for a while.
Fast forward to a week or three ago, and it becomes evident people are switching their BU nodes off for some unknown reason. The number of network nodes started dropping about three weeks ago, yet took a serious plunge as of last night. Whereas there were still around 600 nodes about 36 hours ago, that number has now dropped to 119. It does not appear a new bug has been discovered in the BU code, which leaves a lot of users concerned.
It is unclear what has caused this sudden drop-off, although there is plenty of speculation going on. One user suggests how a lot of these nodes were hosted on VPS plans which were not renewed or simply expired. That is a possibility, although it would be quite strange to see nearly 500 nodes go offline because they were hosted on a VPN for just a few weeks or months. It is equally possible Roger Ver’s tweet about how BU is “production ready” may have caused a sudden disinterest in running a node.
Rest assured there will be quite some more speculation as to what is going on with Bitcoin Unlimited. Even though mining support for this solution is still strong, the rest of the community remains rather disinterested. Service providers have no intention of supporting BU anytime soon, and now the number of nodes is crashing spectacularly. Troubling times are ahead for Bitcoin Unlimited, albeit very few bitcoin experts expected anything different.
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