A narrow research purpose
Bitcoin Node Atlas describes observed public Bitcoin P2P infrastructure. It aims to make the meaning and limits of public network measurements easier to understand, not to identify the people behind nodes or claim complete coverage.
Bounded network activity
The crawler uses limited candidate counts, low concurrency, short network timeouts and an overall runtime guard. Peer advertisements are a bounded discovery source. This redesign does not increase scan limits, enable deeper recursive discovery or change scheduled worker behavior.
No operator identification
The project does not add deanonymization, invasive fingerprinting, wallet tracking, transaction tracking or mempool probing. Approximate geolocation must never be represented as a person's address. Onion endpoints are excluded from physical geography maps.
Responsible use of the checker and API
Use the checker for public endpoints you intend to test. Do not use the API to harass, scan aggressively or attack third-party systems. Cache read-only responses where practical and treat reachability checks as more expensive operations.
Describe uncertainty openly
Different crawlers see different subsets. An address may be unreachable only from one network or at one moment. Software strings are self-reported and geography can be wrong. Attribution is appreciated for public use, but attribution does not turn incomplete observations into a network census.
Continue with Bitcoin node statistics, inspect observed node records, or use the public data API. The data glossary defines the labels used throughout Atlas.