@Luke , I have been in the process of setting up a bitcoin node for the past couple of months on my Win11 machine. I am nearing the end of the downloading process. Only 25 weeks of data yet to download! It seems to be taking entirely too long to download... I am curious if there is a way to look at logs of what my instance of BTC is contributing to the network? Will my machine record any stats that I can go through later? Will it be possible to "ping" my machine somehow to make sure it is actually visible to the network, and not hidden behind my ISP's firewall?
I hope my questions were easy enough to understand - I'm told I complicate questions when I ask them. Thanks for any resources you can point me at!