Author: Pieter Wuille 2014-08-18 17:35:00
Published on: 2014-08-18T17:35:00+00:00
In an email conversation on the Bitcoin-development mailing list in August 2014, Ivan Pustogarov proposed a periodic rotation of outbound connections every two to ten minutes. He believed that this would improve the network's internal knowledge but Gregory Maxwell disagreed with him, stating that connection rotation would only be useful for improving a node's knowledge about available peers and making the network stronger against partitioning. Maxwell argued that if a constant set of outbound peers was kept, then it would be unlikely that any particular attacker would gain strong evidence and therefore privacy would be maintained. However, if the nodes were rotated, then there was a high probability that a sybil pretending to be many nodes would observe the transmission directly. Ultimately, to maintain privacy, broadcasting over tor or i2p is recommended as the traffic is clear text. Pustogarov had not yet looked at the implementation of the idea but he suggested that every X minutes an outgoing connection would be attempted, even if already at the outbound limit. If a connection attempt succeeds, another connection (according to some scoring system) would be replaced by it. Better connections would survive for a longer time, and this mechanism could potentially rotate every few minutes.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T19:15:05.700831+00:00