Author: Mike Hearn 2015-05-26 10:48:46
Published on: 2015-05-26T10:48:46+00:00
During a conversation among members of the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Matt Whitlock shared his experience of operating a Bitcoin-only Wi-Fi network at the Porcupine Freedom Festival ("PorcFest") in New Hampshire last summer. He poisoned the DNS and rejected all outbound connection attempts on port 8333, to force all the wallets to connect to a single local full node, which had connectivity to a single remote node over the internet. Thus, all the lightweight wallets at the festival had bitcoin network connectivity, but they only needed to backhaul the bitcoin network's transaction traffic once. The backhaul was a 3G cellular internet connection, and the local Bitcoin node and network router were hosted on a Raspberry Pi with some Netfilter tricks to restrict connectivity. Whitlock also said that in the future, bitcoinj is very likely to bootstrap from Cartographer nodes (signed HTTP) rather than DNS, and they're steadily working towards Tor by default. So this approach will probably stop working at some point. As breaking PorcFest would kind of suck, they might want a ZeroConf/Rendezvous solution in place so local LANs can capture Bitcoin traffic away from Tor. The Porcupine Freedom Festival ("PorcFest") draws somewhere around 1000-2000 attendees, a solid quarter of whom have bitcoin wallets on their mobile devices. There's a lot of overlap between the Bitcoin and liberty communities. For users' amusement, Whitlock created a graphic banner to advertise the network at the festival.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:23:09.943308+00:00