NODE - about Incoming connection

"There could be multiple reasons why other nodes are not finding you to connect to and you don't have many incoming connections. Most of those reasons have to do with luck. Usually when a new node tries to connect (or after a computer reboot or resume from sleep) it attempts to find other nodes from the list of IPs it has "learned". If those nodes have available incoming connections then the new node connects to them. If they don't have available incoming connections, they give their list of known node IPs to the requesting node and close the connection. Then the new node is trying to connect to those IPs and keeps discovering more IPs until it manages to connect to 8 nodes. As this process includes a degree of randomness some nodes become more well known, others are not so known. Something that helps a lot in becoming more known in the network is for your IP address to not change frequently. Something else is your distance from a core team's node. The 64 nodes connected to a core team node will likely always have all of their 64 incoming connections also filled. That's because brand new nodes that know no other nodes, they initially try to connect to core team's nodes, they likely receive "rejections" and list of known IPs. The IPs of the nodes connected directly on core team's nodes are definitely known by those nodes thus making it easy to be discovered too. Before you ask: It is completely random which nodes end up being connected on to core team nodes. Core team nodes give priority to each other and always accept one another. For the remaining of the 64 incoming connections they accept any other node on a first come first serve basis. But, it is not important to be connected to a core team node, the blockchain is the same everywhere and even a single byte of difference will immediately trigger an error as it would make the block hashes invalid."