Author: John Dillon 2013-08-19 03:09:07
Published on: 2013-08-19T03:09:07+00:00
In this message, Peter Todd discusses ways to harm Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) nodes. He suggests creating "SPV honeypots" that allow incoming connections only from SPV nodes. This would attract a disproportionate percentage of the total SPV population given a relatively small number of nodes. He then proposes making a percentage of transactions be dropped deterministically, either by the bloom matching code or when sent. Users surrounded by sybil nodes will have their transactions mysteriously fail to arrive in their wallets, or have their transactions never confirm. Another way to attack is to flood peers with useless garbage. Todd reveals that he will bounty 2.5BTC to implement the first attack and 0.5BTC for the second. The implementation must include an RFC3514 compliant service bit to let peers know of the operator's intentions. Along those lines, Todd will donate 3BTC to adding service bit selection to DNS seeds. Finally, he talks about showing people the limitations of SPV before they depend too much on it, and nothing wakes users up like a 21 million BTC transaction in their wallet.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T15:54:41.223787+00:00