Does the Monero wallet distribute the blockchain?

Question

Does it send many blocks to other peers? If so how can I turn this off?

Answer 1

Yes, the official Monero app (monerod) also helps the network by distributing the blockchain. This can be turned off by starting monerod with the --hide-my-port argument.

If you haven't set up port-forwarding in your router, most likely you will not distribute the blockchain. You can check how many nodes are connected to your daemon by issuing the following command inside the monerod prompt: status. This shows something like this:

Height: [...], 8(out)+30(in) connections [...]

The number in front of (in) indicates the number of incoming connections. If this is 0 for you, nobody is connected to your node which means you're not distributing the blockchain.