Author: Vladimir Marchenko 2011-06-13 10:54:16
Published on: 2011-06-13T10:54:16+00:00
A suggested method of bootstrapping a bitcoin client involves creating a convention where bitcoind listens on a specific last octet of IPv4 address, such as .14 when possible. This would be used as a last resort option if no other bootstrap method works. The client could start scanning x.x.x.14 addresses in a semi-intelligent order to find a bitcoind peer. While it is a messy process, it does not depend on anything except a bunch of bitcoind by convention preferring listening on x.x.x.14's. The more people that run bitcoind on .14, the quicker it would find a peer and the less scanning there is to do. It is self-regulating and should not lead to DDOS on those unlucky enough to own *.14 and not run bitcoind there. However, Jeff Garzik argued that using HTTP trackers would face the same problems as other current methods. Christian Decker suggested the use of BitTorrent trackers, which are used to handle thousands of requests and would probably scale well enough. He also added that the fact each bitcoin client would contact the tracker would make it very hard for an attacker to get bootstrapping clients to exclusively connect to his compromised clients. Using a tracker such as OpenBittorrent provides the same advantages as using an IRC channel. Jeff Garzik questioned how the client discovers HTTP trackers and suggested that the history and experience of gnutella's web caches vs. UDP host caches is highly relevant here.
Updated on: 2023-05-26T17:52:56.110171+00:00