Author: Matt Whitlock 2015-05-26 05:47:37
Published on: 2015-05-26T05:47:37+00:00
In May 2015, a discussion took place about wallets and their connection to the Bitcoin network. Matt Whitlock shared his experience of operating a Bitcoin-only Wi-Fi network at a remote festival where he poisoned the DNS and rejected all outbound connection attempts on port 8333, forcing all the wallets to connect to a single local full node. Whitlock's network allowed all the lightweight wallets at the festival to have Bitcoin network connectivity while only requiring one backhaul of the Bitcoin network's transaction traffic. Peter Todd found this interesting and asked what festival it was. Whitlock replied that it was The Porcupine Freedom Festival ("PorcFest") in New Hampshire, which had around 1000-2000 attendees, a quarter of whom had Bitcoin wallets on their mobile devices. Whitlock's network used a Raspberry Pi with some Netfilter tricks to restrict connectivity, and he had provisions in place to allow outbound connectivity to the API servers for Mycelium, Blockchain, and Coinbase wallets. He even created a banner to advertise the network at the festival.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:22:05.865818+00:00