No. Having more nodes can not solve the congestion. Having more nodes can help in making the network more decentralized. If talking of network congestion, this is another discussion entirely that is not about nodes nor about decentralizing the bitcoin network.

Having more nodes doesn’t affect the scalability of bitcoin rather things that can affect the scalability of bitcoin is having a much block space reason to why the network underwent the forking to actually get the current segwit protocols which allows more transactions into the 1mb block due to the use of weights as unit and the segregation of the signature or witness from the main transaction.

One of the importance of having much nodes is to ensure decentralization so that everyone is a contributor to the network. The amount of nodes might be reducing as a result of maybe the difficulty in been a solo bitcoin miner due to expenses of power or hashrate needed as such many have stopped running their nodes. But as said it doesn’t contribute to the scalability issue of bitcoin

I believe that may because in early days they didn't distinguish between a miner and a node. In first couple of years you could mine bitcoin using your PC (CPU mining) so every node was also a miner and every miner was a node.

Today they are more separated, a miner needs to purchase mining hardware (ASIC) and they mostly don't even run a node, instead they connect to a mining pool that runs it for them.

Your Moore's Law comparison is flawed because that one is measuring transistor performance, not financial performance of some asset.

And even Moore's Law hut a brick wall like 5 years ago. Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) already pointed that out at CES some years ago.

Bitcoin will eventually reach some saturation point but by then, everyone will be using it.

I wonder how they count the number of nodes. I run a node for about 30 minutes every day. It's main function is to service my wallets, and it seems to work well. Do they sample the network, and count the number of nodes online at that point, or do they run a monitoring system, and register every node that comes on line during that period. Also, I use up to 6 different Internet providers, and some don't provide consistent IP addresses. Will that affect the count?

The amount of nodes doesn't impact that, as it was said.
The size of the block and other things - right up the alley.

The OP's subject line practically contradicts itself: Bitcoin hit a scale ceiling about six months after it started, and it's only gotten slower and more expensive since then.

Bitcoin handles about 500k transactions per day right now, and uses $20B-40B in hardware to do so.

In contrast, worldwide daily credit card processors handle about 2-4 billion transactions per day, and at peak times can process over one million transactions per second.

Bitcoin was never ever designed to be a mainstream currency that people use every day to pay for things--Satoshi was no idiot, and he* knew that his architecture would not support that. Bitcoin was designed to be intentionally slow and expensive to transact, which is what gives it it's security and decentralization.

The blockchain architecture has one unique advantage (and only one): to thwart government control over the network and thus allow transactions to proceed that one or more governments would wish to stop. If you don't want to accomplish this, then using the blockchain architecture is a stupid waste of time and computing resources because every other feature Bitcoin has can be accomplished cheaper and faster and better in other ways.

But the performance tax you pay for this feature is that it will never ever scale to anything close to mainstream.

As for true decentralization per Bitcoin's original purpose, it's worth noting that today there are just a few, very identifiable, publicly known companies that control the majority of the Bitcoin hashrate. Yes, there are thousands of nodes, but there are only perhaps 3-5 legal entities in the world that matter, and those entities could be compelled by (say) the US government to do whatever they wanted them--so Bitcoin ins't really "decentralized" in the way it originally was anyhow.

For Bitcoin's purpose today, which is a meme investment that is fronted by centralized apps and brokers, there is no scalability problem that anybody cares about.


(* We don't know if Satoshi was a "he", "she", or a dev team at the NSA/CIA, but I'm just using that terminology for brevity).