Observations and thoughts from operating a full node.

Full node owner here. Total number of connections seems to hover around about 60, that's 8 outgoing and 52 incoming.I figure if every node accepted incoming connections then on average they would all have 16 connections (8 incoming + 8 outgoing), but not every node does accept connections, therefore those nodes that do require additional bandwidth.Right now the bandwidth is acceptable but to be honest if it went much higher I'd probably apply a connection limit, but I'm concerned that that simply pushes the connections to the remaining nodes, causing a cascade of nodes throttling incoming connections.I was wondering though if the problem could be mitigated by reducing the default outgoing connection count below 8 (e.g. to say 5). I appreciate we want a well connected network, but I figure there's a balance between robust connectivity and network robustness through incentivising full node operators.Or perhaps there are other ways of addressing bandwidth problems that would make connection count an irrelevant factor. E.g. I think a lot of the bandwidth I see is nodes connecting, syncing up and disconnecting. If we did have a reduced version of the blockchain without the complete transaction history then maybe that traffic would be greatly reduced(?) via /r/Bitcoin http://bit.ly/1iTIo6y