Author: Matt Corallo 2013-11-06 05:50:21
Published on: 2013-11-06T05:50:21+00:00
Recently, concerns have been raised over the fragility of the public Bitcoin network. In response, Matt Corallo has organized a system of peering between nodes in the network by creating high-speed relay nodes for miners and merchants/exchanges. This system aims to act as a fallback in case of any issue with the public Bitcoin network and decrease block propagation times between miners. However, it is not designed to replace or decrease the need for the public Bitcoin P2P network, nor is it an attempt at centralization.The network currently consists of one specially-designed relay node, with more expected to come online in the coming days. The network is open to everyone via public relay nodes but will also have nodes available only to large miners and merchants/exchanges to mitigate the ability of malicious parties to DoS the network. Interested parties are encouraged to establish their own private peering agreements with large miners as needed.To peer with the public relay nodes, select the closest region out of us-west, us-east, eu, au, or jpy, and add public.REGION.relay.mattcorallo.com to your addnode list. Each relay node can be connected to either port 8334 or 8335, with the former relaying only blocks and the latter relaying both blocks and transactions. The relay nodes will request any transactions that appear in your invs regardless of which port you connect to.While the relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying to keep relay fast. Therefore, users should never mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with their own bitcoin validator. Additionally, the relay nodes do not follow the standard inv-getdata-tx/block flow but instead relay transactions/blocks immediately after doing cursory verification.The relay nodes are not designed to ensure that users never miss data and may fail to relay some transactions. They are also not a replacement for having peers on the standard P2P network, but rather exist to augment the existing P2P network. If users miss a relay and then reconnect, that data will not be sent again by the relay nodes. The relay nodes are not designed to respond to standard getdata requests.If you are a merchant/exchange/large miner/other important node operator and wish to gain access to additional domain names which map to relay nodes with fewer peers, a form can be filled out on the website provided. The source for the relay nodes can be found on GitHub. Users are encouraged to email bitcoin-peering at mattcorallo.com with any comments, concerns, or suggestions.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:41:52.854000+00:00