Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-11-04 15:51:07
Published on: 2013-11-04T15:51:07+00:00
In a conversation between Mike Hearn and another individual, an alternative protocol change is proposed to address the issue of sybil nodes. Instead of changing the rules for selecting the chain to build on, the proposal suggests embedding IP addresses of nodes into coinbases and having any bitcoind that is creating work automatically connect to IPs that appeared in enough recent blocks. The idea is to create a miner backbone that excludes nodes which are already in the most recent blocks and includes the best remaining ones. The proposal suggests including these nodes as OP_RETURN outputs in coinbase transactions, limiting them to one or two per block, making it harder to get partitioned from the majority hashrate. However, these hosts would be DOS targets, so it isn't a silver bullet. The proposal also suggests making the majority hashrate self-unpartitionability stronger by having miners add an encryption key to their coinbase transactions and subsequent miners mine encrypted addr messages to single other block sources to automatically weave a miner darknet with access controlled by successful block creation. However, the author doubts whether it's worth the complexity of bandwidth.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:40:15.110391+00:00