When you look at the node counts of different varieties of Bitcoin, you will see numbers such as from Coin.Dance
Which indicates that Classic has almost half the nodes as Bitcoin Core. "Impressive!" you may think to yourself. Over at Bitnodes you get similar numbers:
A less informed observer may now be misled into thinking that a significant proportion of bitcoiners, represented through nodes, are supporters of Classic rather than Core.
However thanks to Alex Petrov and Bitfury we have some more detailed data about the providers of the IP addresses of the nodes, and divided amongst Classic and Core we see that there is a significant difference. Let's look first at the Core distribution:
We see a pretty decentralized distribution here, the most common provider is Hetzner at 8%, but the bulk of the nodes are distributed across nearly 1,000 different providers.
And for comparison, here's the Classic distribution by provider:
What sticks out immediately from this data is how centralized the node distribution is for Classic. A whopping 31% of them are Amazon.com, while 23% are Choopa. So two conglomerate VPS providers have a duopoly over node count on the Classic side.
This is likely a result of various campaigns by wealthy bitcoin holders who support Classic, who have pushed for artificially inflating the Classic-supporting node count by spinning up instances at VPS providers/datacenters.
Interestingly, some Classic supporters, such as Brian Armstrong, still are touting the growing nodecount as a victory, despite this data showing that it is artificially inflated:
Some are choosing to continue to fight, while most people have moved on from the Classic vs. Core debate. The issue was settled when the Core laid out a clear road map and the Roundtable Consensus from miners came overwhelmingly in support of Core, who agreed to a blocksize increase after Segregated Witness is being rolled out next month, and developing Lightning Network on the side.
