Author: Phantomcircuit 2012-01-31 09:21:09
Published on: 2012-01-31T09:21:09+00:00
In an email exchange between Gavin Andresen and Michael Hendricks, the topic of Sybil attacks on the Bitcoin network was discussed. While the randomness in Pieter's design prevents finely crafted attacks, an attacker with control over 60% of the network's nodes would have a 1.7% chance of success in a Sybil attack if a client has eight connections to the network. However, nodes that accept incoming connections are less vulnerable because the probability of success decreases exponentially with the number of connections. To decrease susceptibility to Sybil attacks, a command-line option for increasing the maximum number of outbound connections could be added. Additionally, the possibility of removing the IRC bootstrapping mechanism was considered, as it would remove code and prevent ISPs from tagging Bitcoin as malware. It was suggested that the IRC bootstrapping mechanism should be disabled by default one release after the new address manager is released. If the number of outbound connections is increased, the delay of transaction broadcast code needs to be improved to avoid a broadcast storm.
Updated on: 2023-06-05T02:12:00.183459+00:00