Author: Matt Corallo 2014-08-03 00:56:54
Published on: 2014-08-03T00:56:54+00:00
Recently, there has been a reasonable amount of discussion about the continued fragility of the public Bitcoin network. To this extent, Matt Corallo organized a system of peering between nodes in the network by creating a system of high-speed relay nodes for miners and merchants/exchanges. This system acts as a fallback in the case that the public Bitcoin network encounters issues and decreases block propagation times between miners. It is NOT designed to in any way replace or decrease the need for the public Bitcoin P2P network. The network consists of one specially-designed relay node currently, but Matt hopes to bring more online in the coming days. The network is open to everyone via a few public relay nodes, but also will have nodes which are made available only to large miners and merchants/exchanges to mitigate the ability of malicious parties to DoS the network. To peer with the public relay nodes, simply select the closest region out of us-west (West Coast US), us-east (East Coast US), eu (Western Europe), au (Australia), or jpy (Japan) and add public.REGION.relay.mattcorallo.com to your addnode list. Note that since all of the relay nodes will relay between each other, you gain no latency advantage by peering with more than the closest node to you (and currently all the regions map to one node, so there they're redundant anyway).The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator. The relay nodes are NOT designed to ensure that you never miss data, and may fail to relay some transactions. Additionally, because the relay nodes do not respond to standard getdata requests, if you miss a relay and then reconnect, that data will not be sent again by the relay nodes. The relay nodes are NOT a replacement for having peers on the standard P2P network, they are only there to augment the existing P2P network.If you are a merchant/exchange/large miner/other important node operator and wish to gain access to additional domain names which map to relay nodes with fewer peers, please fill out the form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UL82QdcXXEhZwSHJAK04Sk_cWg4zLOu8a216nO7Mt8c/viewform. You can find the source for the relay nodes at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode.Finally, you've all seen the recent discussion on malicious mining algorithms. Though those are not entirely prevented by reducing block propagation times, they can be significantly limited compared to the current, rather disjoint, network.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:42:42.558683+00:00