40 to 47 Percent of Reachable Bitcoin Core Peers Announce a Line Past Its End of Life, by Three Counts

The end-of-life date for the 29.x line added 610 peers to the share at KIT's monitor; one group of 781 peers adds 5.7 points. May's High advisory covers releases on 39.6 percent of Core peers; 5.3 percent announced a release with October's fixes.

By Satoshi Gazette/2 Nov 2026, 07:04 UTC/Block 974,225/4 min read

A small computer in an open black case on a light-wood workbench, a green status light on and two cables plugged in. Beside it lies an older, dusty circuit board, unplugged, with a screwdriver nearby, in morning daylight. — Image: Illustration: Satoshi Gazette (AI-generated)

Of 9,368 peers connected to KIT's monitor over IPv4 and IPv6 on 30 October, 8,076 announced Bitcoin Core, and 3,808 of those, 47.2 percent, announced a release line past its end-of-life date in bitcoincore.org's table.01 02 One group of 781 peers adds 5.7 points; without it the share is 41.5 percent, 3,027 of 7,295.

By the same rule, BTC Nodes' IP entries, 13 minutes earlier, give 39.9 percent, 2,387 of 5,975; its IP entries all pass a chain check.10 Luke Dashjr's file gives 46.6 percent at 12:00 UTC on 31 October, 1,981 of 4,254 listening peers, and 47.4 at 06:00 UTC on 2 November. He maintains Knots; the file states no method.11

The step of 27 October

The share read 41.3 percent on 26 October and 48.0 on 28 October, with no snapshot between.03 The 610 peers on 29.x entered the share on the table's date for its end, 27 October, none needing to change software; 28 October otherwise reads 40.5.

KIT's files read 51.2 on 8 August and 41.6 on 28 September, with no table date between; 41.9 and 35.9 without the group and a second, on 27.0.0 on AS63949.05 06

A line chart of the share of Bitcoin Core peers on end-of-life release lines at KIT's monitor, 28 September to 30 October 2026. The recorded line runs between 39 and 44 percent, then jumps to 48 at the 27 October date for 29.x and ends at 47.2. A dashed line counting 29.x as end of life throughout runs near 50, peaks at 51 and ends at the same 47.2. A red line, the dashed line without the group on 25.x, 781 peers on the last day, runs from 45 to 41.5. Diamonds mark 39.9 for BTC Nodes and 46.6 for Luke Dashjr's file. — KIT's monitor, each recorded daily snapshot from 28 September to 12:43:44 UTC on 30 October 2026. The step at 27 October is the table's date for 29.x, in a table last modified on 29 October; no peer had to change software. With 29.x counted on every day, 30 October is the lowest of the 31 rows. From 17 to 26 October all three lines also hold a second group on 27.0.0, 158 to 370 peers; on 18 October, the highest dashed reading at 51.1, the row reads 43.4 without both groups. Without the group on 25.x the share ends at 41.5 percent. BTC Nodes' IP entries on 30 October give 39.9 and Luke Dashjr's file at 12:00 UTC on 31 October gives 46.6.Satoshi Gazette chart · KIT (CC BY 4.0) · bitcoincore.org · btcnodes.io Project · Luke Dashjr · Data as of 31 Oct 2026Sources: 01 · 03 · 02 · 10 · 11Full-size chart →
Method
Core peers are counted by release line from the user agents in KIT's daily files, and each line takes its status from bitcoincore.org's life-cycle table, by the reader in the Gazette's node counts. The group is Core peers on 25.x with services number 1037 on AS396982, AS16509, AS24940, AS14061 and AS14618, sized from each raw file; two other 25.x peers with that number on other networks stay in the count. From 17 to 26 October the accent line still holds a second, separate group on 27.0.0 on AS63949 (321, 300, 296, 325, 370, 194, 181, 184, 187, 158 peers). The diamonds apply the same line rule to BTC Nodes' IPv4 and IPv6 entries and to the listening field of Luke Dashjr's file at 12:00:14 UTC (the file changes through the day and read 47.0 at 17:00:10 UTC). Those sites do not publish these shares. BTC Nodes asks for this citation: Rodrigo Martínez (@brunneis). btcnodes.io Project. Retrieved from https://github.com/brunneis/bitnodes. Counts only; no modelling.

The 781

The group is Core peers on 25.x announcing services number 1037 on five networks: 433 on Google Cloud, 221 on two Amazon networks, 77 on Hetzner, 50 on DigitalOcean.12 Their connections' median age was 12 minutes, against about seven days for other Core peers; no other group of that shape above 15 peers had a median under two hours. Nothing in the record says they are not nodes.

The filter finds 704 peers on 1 December 2025, 47 on 1 January, 31 on 1 June and 868 on 26 October.23 07 24 08 Of the 781 addresses, 601 were in KIT's file of 1 November 2024.09

The advisories

Core's High advisory of 5 May covers versions after 0.14.0 and before 29.0: a crash, code execution called unlikely, that an attacker must mine a block with valid proof of work to trigger.13 On 30 October, 3,196 peers announced a release in that range, 39.6 percent of Core peers, or 33.1 without the 781. BTC Nodes' entries give 31.8, Dashjr's file 39.0.

Core posted three more on 28 October as easily discoverable bugs, fixed in 29.5, 30.4, 31.2 and 32.1, naming no first affected version.14 15 16 One, Medium, grows memory by up to 2 MB an hour per malicious inbound peer and 5 MB per outbound. One, Medium, lets a peer crash a connected Windows, macOS or BSD node, not Linux. One, Low, is called impractical to exploit on 64-bit; 32-bit systems and FAT32 block storage remain affected.

About 46 hours after the releases reached GitHub, 428 Core peers, 5.3 percent, announced one, 288 of them on 32.1.19 The other 7,648 did not: 3,788 on end-of-life lines, 3,731 on maintained lines, 129 others.

Core's policy discloses Medium and High bugs two weeks after the last affected release reaches end of life.17 32.1's notes of 27 October count three, fixed in 30.0, due two weeks after those notes, no affected versions named.18 The 3,808 are on lines older than 30.0.

The other account

Core's page says end-of-life versions "do not generally receive security fixes" and tells users to upgrade.02 An open RaspiBlitz pull request keeps its base image on 29.5 for a JoinMarket dependency.21 Core's page says software that does not know a new consensus rule may accept invalid transactions.02

What the record does not say

Tor, I2P and unreachable nodes are not in KIT's file; BTC Nodes across all its networks, not only the IP entries counted above, gives 29.8. A version is what a peer announces; a peer is an address. The record does not say who runs the 781 or why, why any peer stays on a line, its operating system, how far back the bugs of 28 October reach or whether any was exploited.

Knots' 1,096 peers are outside the share; the table covers Core. No final Knots release carried the three fixes on 30 October; a candidate tagged on 31 October does, on the BLAKE2b line the Gazette does not file as Bitcoin node software.22

Group, version, historic and other counts' shares are Gazette calculations.