How this map works
Zecnero has two public seed nodes, one in Toronto and one in London. A new node finds the network through them, so the seeds see a large part of it. Every 10 minutes each seed asks its own node which peers it is connected to. A node is on the map if either seed saw it at least once in the last 24 hours.
The map is always at least an hour old. A snapshot of the counts is taken once an hour and published an hour after it was taken, so it changes at most once an hour and never shows who connected a moment ago.
Every dot sits at a fixed point for its country, the same point whoever the nodes are and wherever they really are. The two seeds are marked the same way, at the point for Canada and for the United Kingdom. Nothing on the map is finer than a country: no cities, no coordinates, no addresses.
A country with fewer than three nodes is never shown on its own. Its nodes are added to its region instead, such as Europe or Asia, and a region with fewer than three goes into “Elsewhere”. The seeds are public, so they are shown as seeds and left out of every count.
What counts as a node
A node here is one public IP address that was connected to a seed. That means:
- Nodes that never connect to a seed are not counted. The map shows the part of the network the seeds can see, not all of it.
- Several nodes behind one address, such as one home router, count as one.
- Private, reserved and loopback addresses are ignored, and so are the seeds themselves when they connect to each other.
- A node seen by both seeds counts once.
What is kept, and where
No IP address is published, written to disk, logged or sent to anyone. Each seed looks an address up in a country database stored on the seed itself, so no outside service is ever asked where an address is. It then replaces the address with a keyed hash and forgets it. The key changes every day and only the two seeds hold it, so the hashes mean nothing to anyone else and cannot be matched from one day to the next.
Those hashes, each with a country code, stay in the seeds’ memory for 24 hours. The Toronto seed hands its list to the London seed over an encrypted connection that accepts the London seed and nothing else. The London seed adds the two lists together, counting each hash once, applies the rules above and publishes the totals. Only the totals leave the seeds.
The numbers behind this page are public at explorer.zecnero.org/api/nodes-map. The code is in the explorer’s repository on GitLab.
Data and credits
IP geolocation by DB-IP, from its IP to Country Lite database under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The seeds download a new copy each month and check it against the checksum DB-IP publishes. Country borders and points from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.
Next: run a node and mine, or look at the chain on the explorer.