Recently China has updated its firewall blocking bitcoin sites and pools. Whether this is simple blacklist or more sophisticated packet targeting is uncertain, however this update did spefically target VPN handshakes.

Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 at 1:07 PM
From: Drak <drak@zikula.org>
To: "Mike Hearn" <mike@plan99.net>
Cc: "Bitcoin Dev" <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Why are we bleeding nodes?

For what it's worth, the number of nodes rose dramatically during the China bullrun (I recall 45k in China alone) and dropped as dramatically as the price after the first PBOC announcement designed to cool down bitcoin trading in China.

On 7 April 2014 12:34, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

At the start of February we had 10,000 bitcoin nodes. Now we have 8,500 and still falling:

http://getaddr.bitnodes.io/dashboard/chart/?days=60

I know all the reasons why people might stop running a node (uses too much disk space, bandwidth, lost interest etc). But does anyone have any idea how we might get more insight into what's really going on? It'd be convenient if the subVer contained the operating system, as then we could tell if the bleed was mostly from desktops/laptops (Windows/Mac), which would be expected, or from virtual servers (Linux), which would be more concerning.

When you set up a Tor node, you can add your email address to the config file and the Tor project sends you emails from time to time about things you should know about. If we did the same, we could have a little exit survey: if your node disappears for long enough, we could email the operator and ask why they stopped.

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