Although Chinese authorities intensify crackdown on domestic bitcoin mining farms, the number of bitcoin full node from China has been on the rise since the beginning of February.

According to data from Bitnodes, a website that has a revolving network map of all the reachable full nodes on earth, there are 12235 reachable Bitcoin nodes as of March 13 around the world. Surprisingly, China, with 2292 reachable notes, has surpassed Germany(1967 nodes) to become the world’s second largest country to run full nodes, second only to the United States.

A report from Tencent Finance suggested that the number of global bitcoin full nodes before February 2018 was quite stable, around 10,000. 5%-7% of those nodes were from China. February, however, saw a sudden surge in the number of full nodes from China, jumping to 18 % of the total. The United States has the highest number of full nodes, with 2771 online and accounting for 22.65%.

China’s top internet-finance regulator, the Leading Group of Beijing Internet Risks Remediation issued documents on January 2 to require local governments to guide bitcoin mining operations to orderly retreat from the business.Since then, an increasing number of big Chinese bitcoin miners have relocated overseas.

So why have full nodes from China continued to rise recently under strict oversight? There is a possibility that smaller miners starts to pop up when big ones are banned.

What Are Bitcoin Nodes?

Simply speaking, bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The originator(one node) has to broadcast his transaction to surrounding nodes. Those nodes that have received the transaction information then tell more nodes the message. Eventually the entire Bitcoin network knows about it and records the original transaction. After a transaction is broadcast to the network, bitcoin miners will confirm the transaction and record it on the blockchain.

Every bitcoin wallet is a node, and those that contain an entire copy of the blockchain are called bitcoin full nodes. Comparing with the number of lightweight nodes, only a small amount of nodes on the network are full nodes because running full nodes will not be rewarded and bitcoin transactions can be successfully completed without full nodes. But full nodes are still the backbone of the network.

Full nodes perform two distinct functions: First,they are to download the entire bitcoin blockchain and to fully validate all transactions and blocks; Second, they are to become the second line of defense for bitcoin network, protecting the network from potential attacks.

In order to maintain the security of the entire bitcoin system, It is necessary to increase the number of bitcoin nodes to a certain extent . As a decentralized P2P network, more decentralized nodes on it can ensure that the bitcoin system is able to withstand sudden shocks brought by disruptive technologies.