While the United States holds the biggest share of Bitcoin (BTC) hash rate contribution and ATM network, the city hosting the most reachable Bitcoin nodes — a crucial pillar of the Bitcoin network — is Frankfurt, Germany.
Bitcoin nodes are a distributed network of computers that run the Bitcoin software and accept a set of proof-of-work (PoW) consensus rules to validate and broadcast transactions on the blockchain. Of the 43,706 nodes hosted across 134 countries, the U.S. hosts 9,999 (30.53%), while Germany ranks second with 4,529 (13.83%) nodes, according to data from Bitnodes.
However, when it comes to the contribution of individual cities, Frankfurt was found to host the largest number of IPv4/IPv6 Bitcoin nodes at the time of writing. Nearly 2%, or 652 nodes, remain active in Frankfurt. The U.S. city of Ashburn takes the second spot with 517 (1.58%) nodes, as shown below.
Due to factors such as internet service provider firewalls and private networks, nearly 18% or 5,865 Bitcoin nodes were not attributed to any specific location — aiding Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision for a truly decentralized payments system. The top 10 cities with the highest Bitcoin nodes include Helsinki, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Moscow, Tokyo, Dublin and Nuremberg.
Distributed across 5,773 cities worldwide, over 60% of the nodes run on IPv4 protocols, 14% run on IPv6 protocols and more than 25% run anonymously on .onion.
Related: Lightning Network gets physical form in Australia with Bitcoin ATM
Amid skyrocketing hash rates and increased adoption, the growth of the Bitcoin ATM network seemed stagnant over the past six months.
Just 94 Bitcoin ATMs were added to the global network between July and December 2022, with a modest 4,169 ATMs added during the year’s first six months.