Bear in mind that 8000 is the number of nodes accepting connections. There are likely many more nodes connected to the network that are not listening. I base th

Bear in mind that 8000 is the number of nodes accepting connections. There are likely many more nodes connected to the network that are not listening. I base this on the fact that by default each node will attempt to maintain 8 outbound connections, so if each node accepted connections then on average they would each have a total of 16 connections. However, in my experience any node accepting incoming connections will have many more than the additional 8 incoming connections we might expect. I throttle total connections at 64, but unthrottled I've seen it go over 100, admittedly after a few days of uptime.