Author: Mike Hearn 2013-08-17 12:35:41
Published on: 2013-08-17T12:35:41+00:00
The Bitcoin community is debating the use of Bloom filtering nodes in the network. Some users have complained about battery life and bandwidth impact, even with Bloom filtering, leading to a change in default behavior in SPV clients that now require Bloom-capable (0.8+) peers by default and will disconnect from older nodes. However, there are concerns about the security of relying on a smaller subset of Bloom filtering nodes. Warren Togami Jr. suggests a solution that would protect users more by making non-Bloom peers okay only if plugged into power and using wifi; otherwise, it would scale back to less secure behavior when battery and bandwidth matters. Peter Todd raises concerns about the possibility of sybil attacks on the network by creating "SPV honeypots" that allow incoming connections only from SPV nodes, thus attracting a disproportionate percentage of the total SPV population given a relatively small number of nodes. This could be used to harm SPV nodes by making a certain percentage of transactions fail to arrive in their wallets or never confirm. Mike Hearn suggests that a change in thinking may be required for P2P networks to accommodate the future, dominated by mobiles and tablets. Lastly, there is a question about whether bitcoinj has any protections against peers flooding users with useless garbage that matches the bloom filter, leading to an increase in data bill.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T15:57:42.458434+00:00