[Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping via BitTorrent trackers

Christian Decker decker.christian at gmail.com
Mon Jun 13 11:48:38 UTC 2011


Yes, those trackers would be hard coded, just like the IRC servers and
channels are hardcoded right now.

The advantages over IRC and DNS Seeds are:
 - sporadic HTTP requests to a tracker, as opposed to keeping an IRC
connection open at all times
 - no virus/botnet like behaviour (automatically join IRC channel with
cryptic name), ISPs tend to bother network admins (like myself) with alerts
when they see this...
 - adapts faster than DNS Seeds which require configuration changes on seed
should the nodes become unreachable
 - we already use HTTP to determine our external IP, so it would be a
consolidation of transports
 - more peers than DNS Seeds (better load balancing)

As for Vladimirs proposal, seems like an extreme measure, that is not really
practical. Also it leads to network partitions since nodes will prefer their
own /8 and /16 networks. IPv6 will also soon be a problem for this method.

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Vladimir Marchenko <
vladimir at marchenko.co.uk> wrote:

> one possible bootstrap method of last resort,
>
> 1. create a convention of bitcoind listening on a specific last octest
> of IPv4 address, let's say, .14 when possible. Those of us who have
> access to IP space would use .14's.
>
> 2. if no other bootstrap method works, client could start scanning
> x.x.x.14 addresses, perhaps in some semi-intelligent order (starting
> from more pobable /8's and /16's), if enough people place bitcoind on
> x.x.x.14 than after a 10-100 thousand checks it bound to find a
> bitcoind peer.
>
> It's messy, with all the excessive scanning etc... but it does not
> depend on anything except a bunch of bitcoind by convention preferring
> listening on x.x.x.14's.
>
> Given that this is a method of last resort in bootrap chain it whould
> hopefully not lead to DDOS on those unlucky to own *.14 and not
> running bitcoind there. Also the more people are running bitcoind on
> .14, the quicker it would find a peer, the less scanning to do. It is
> kind of self-regualting.
>
> For whatever it worth...
>
>
> On 13 June 2011 10:56, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik at exmulti.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Christian Decker
> > <decker.christian at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> BitTorrent trackers are used to handle several thousands of requests, so
> >> they would probably scale well enough. I'm not even talking about using
> the
> >> DHT trackers, but using old fashioned HTTP based trackers. The fact that
> >> each bitcoin client would contact the tracker would make it very hard
> for an
> >> attacker to get bootstrapping clients to exclusively connect to his
> >> compromised clients. I would say that using a tracker such as
> OpenBittorrent
> >> provides the same advantages as using an IRC channel.
> >
> > And how does the client discover HTTP trackers?  You're either
> > hardcoding -those- into the client, or adding an additional bootstrap
> > step to discover them.  Either way, it has the same problems as other
> > current methods.
> >
> > The history and experience of gnutella's web caches vs. UDP host
> > caches seems highly relevant here.
> >
> > --
> > Jeff Garzik
> > exMULTI, Inc.
> > jgarzik at exmulti.com
> >
> >
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