Re: [Bitcoin-development] "network disruption as a service" and proof of local storage

[Matt Whitlock <bip@mattwhitlock.name>]

On Friday, 27 March 2015, at 4:57 pm, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 11:16:43AM -0400, Matt Whitlock wrote:
> > I agree that someone could do this, but why is that a problem? Isn't the goal of this exercise to ensure more full nodes on the network? In order to be able to answer the challenges, an entity would need to be running a full node somewhere. Thus, they have contributed at least one additional full node to the network. I could certainly see a case for a company to host hundreds of lightweight (e.g., EC2) servers all backed by a single copy of the block chain. Why force every single machine to have its own copy? All you really need to require is that each agency/participant have its own copy.
> 
> They would not even have to run one. It could just pass the query to a random other node, and forward its result :)

D'oh. Of course. Thanks. :/

The suggestion about encrypting blocks with a key tied to IP address seems like a bad idea, though. Lots of nodes are on dynamic IP addresses. It wouldn't really be practical to re-encrypt the entire block chain every time a node's IP address changes.