I just set up Bitcoin Core on my Windows 11 Pro. Took me like a day and a half to sync everything. The Bitcoin folder is huge, 608GB! I’m seeing 10 peers connected and there’s a lot of data sending and receiving. Just downloaded the command line stuff too.
Quick question: I see 10 outbound connections but 0 inbound. Do I need inbound connections for my node? I’ve got Bitdefender set to allow all connections for Bitcoin-qt.exe.
When your node connects to mine, we exchange data. If your node starts the connection, it's outgoing for you and incoming for me. After that, it works the same no matter who initiated it.
If you want to accept incoming connections, you gotta either open a port on your router or set up TOR. That way, you can handle incoming without router hassles.
By allowing incoming connections, you're letting peers send requests to connect to your node. The default port is 8333. If you stick to just outbound connections, your node still connects to others, but they need to allow inbound connections for data exchange.
You might find this page useful. It has most of the configurations for Bitcoin Core.
Also, using a VPN that supports port forwarding could help, but those are getting rare now due to abuse.
So, 10 outbound connections means you're good, your client is connecting to others to keep updated and send transactions. Inbound connections are nice to have but not critical. They just let other nodes connect directly to yours.
Thanks, everyone! Sounds like I’m all set for now. That note in the installation guide about needing an incoming connection might need a rewrite though.