Can Bitcoin Network support billions of nodes?

Scalability Context

As far as I know, most academic articles on Bitcoin scalability focus on the limits to transactions per second. This appears to be greater concern than the upper limit on the number of nodes.

Another issue that we think is more careful about is the size of blockchain data that all full nodes need to store and handle. See “Shards” and more.

Maximum node

Put your internet bandwidth and more aside. One limitation of the number of nodes is that if the network-wide gossip protocol delay is close or more than the 10 minute block interval, the network is likely to be split naturally. I think an indicator of an approach to this could be an increase in the number of small-scale re-growings.

I think this issue depends heavily on the maximum number of hops between two nodes (or important groups of nodes) where one hop communicates with one bitcoin node (or a key group of nodes) (each can intrude in many IP routing hops.

I think this is probably related to the concept of the “version era” of information within gossip networks. There are many articles on this more general issue (example)

Data Sultput probably has no constraint on the number of nodes, as the data throughput of synchronized nodes is not dependent on the network size. Overhead at about 4 MB per 10 minutes. In the case of SPV nodes, they can form a majority in large networks.

Note that the above is speculation and not quantified.