It just means that the speed at which you can receive block / transaction data from the average peer node has been going down.
Discussion
And how is this measured? Maybe it says more about the systems that are doing the measuring, than it does any the systems being measured?
According to bitnodes: Network speed of a reachable Bitcoin node is measured once per day by downloading a sample block from the node. The aggregated data includes only reachable IPv4/IPv6 nodes that do return block data at the time of measurement.
Interesting. Thanks for that. I guess I should have checked myself 🙂
Do they consider only archival nodes, and request a random block uniformly going back to the genesis block? Or just from the most recent few hundred blocks?
I ask because this might be basically about increased size of the chain. More blocks means the node is IO-bound while searching for an old block
Also, are recent blocks bigger? My BlockStats Explorer suggests that blocks are getting bigger in the last year or two
