Is there any point in having monerod daemon running all the time without any open ports for incoming?
Does it still help the Monero network by providing a node or is it pointless?
I am unable to open the ports as I am using a wireless connection to a router in the building that I don't have access to. It's running fine for me but I get this message every 15 minutes:
WARN global src/p2p/net_node.inl:1338 No incoming connections - check firewalls/routers allow port 18080
If you run a node and do not open inbound connections, then you cannot relay other users transactions or relay blocks. So having a full node in this scenario wont be helping the network. However, it is still useful for yourself, as it increases your security when creating and relaying your own transactions.
It's also worth noting that even if you do not specifically open-up/forward inbound connections, any p2p nodes your node initiates a connection to, can still sync blocks and receive transactions from you.
Running a node with only outgoing connections is less useful than running a node which allows incoming connections, but still useful.
A node which cannot accept incoming connections will connect to nodes from its peer list, and as such is unlikely to find nodes which appeared recently on the network, since those addresses will propagate through the P2P network with some delay. It will thus be substantially less likely to serve blocks to nodes which are in the process of syncing historical data.
However, your node provides extra edges in the P2P network topology, which helps provide redundancy when relaying transactions and blocks (which are indeed relayed, contrary to the false claim in the other answer).
If you have the bandwidth for it, you can also increase the default number of outgoing connections (it defaults to 8, but the --out-peers option can set it to higher values). This will increase the number of edges in the network, similarly to what would happen if your node were to accept incoming connections (though would still be less likely to connect to nodes syncing historical data).
