[Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping via BitTorrent trackers

[Jeff Garzik]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:55 AM, Christian Decker
<decker.christian at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have quite a few bootstrapping mechanisms, starting with the overly
> complex (IMHO) IRC bootstrapping, which is often suspected as bot-activity.
> Then we have a few hardcoded nodes and some fallback nodes. I was wondering
> why we didn't adopt BitTorrent tracker bootstrapping until now? It's
> basically all it does. Given a hash (SHA1 hash of the genesis bloc would be
> nice ^^) it gives you a list of other nodes with the same hash.

It seems to offer few benefits over DNS seeding, while potentially
potentially creating a vulnerable hot spot in the DHT.  Sybil attacks
on DHTs are well documented.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
exMULTI, Inc.
jgarzik at exmulti.com