Don't use the -debug with a minus sign in your .conf - just write "debug=thin".

I was referring to its use as a command line option.



It's not really possible that all the BU nodes are too busy - one of them listed is my node and I know for a fact that I still have open slots.

So it must be a different problem.



Try removing the :8333 from your addnode lines, because it's not necessary since they are on the standard port. I don't have that :8333 in my.conf , and it still works.



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You can only "force" a peer to talk xthin to YOUR node if the peer supports it and is prepared to talk to you in that way. I don't know if there are other criteria which may make a peer decide that it's NOT going to talk xthin with your node, but it is theoretically possible (e.g. the peer might decide using some performance metric that xthin with your node would be worse than another way, or the peer might be in some kind of "warming-up" phase where xthin is not its preferred way. I don't know if that could be the case with the actual implementation right now - haven't studied the code, sorry).