Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cut-through propagation of blocks

[Alan Reiner <etotheipi@gmail.com>]

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On 05/24/2014 07:41 PM, Ashley Holman wrote:
> On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Bernd
> Jendrissek <bitcoin@bpj-code.co.za
> <mailto:bitcoin@bpj-code.co.za>> wrote:
>
>     The difference is that with cut-through forwarding of blocks, a
>     sufficiently motivated attacker (being willing to blow 25BTC's worth
>     of electricity on the effort) can subjugate the entire Bitcoin network
>     to its DoS attack, rather than having to connect to every node
>     individually and then still have those individual nodes reject that
>     invalid block without relaying any knowledge of its existence.
>
>
> That is true, but they could also apply the same hash power to mine
> valid blocks and would achieve the same outcome (their blocks would go
> to everyone), except they would get paid for it.  I wonder if it
> should even be called DoS, due to the extreme and costly rate-limiting
> thats implied.
>
>  
>
>     An attack could also take the form of a block body that never arrives
>     - a sort of teergrube attack, where the goal is to get the network
>     mining empty block upon empty block on top of that valid-PoW header
>     whose body never arrives. It doesn't have to be with an explicitly
>     invalid block.
>
>
> Thank you for raising this, as I share this concern.  There is another
> similar attack: if I send you a new block very slowly, I occupy all
> your upstream peer slots indefinitely until the block is complete,
> because there is no out-of-band messaging capability or ability to
> cancel a message.
>
> There is also sub-optimal logic in choosing to download a block only
> from the first person to offer it.  It means you are fetching it from
> the lowest latency path, but what really matters is who can give it to
> you fastest.  If there are multiple people who can send you a block at
> once, and you have some idea of your spare upstream bandwidth
> capacity, why not let two or more peers compete to send you the block
> fastest?
>
> So to implement this type of thing,  the p2p protocol should allow for
> multiplexing of messages.  Something like HTTP chunked encoding.  It
> could be in the form of:
>
> <msgid><chunksize><rawbytes>, <msgid><chunksize><rawbytes>,  etc etc
>
> You only send a chunk once you've got the whole chunk in your buffer,
> so it's not possible to get hung up on a single slow message.   One
> block can overtake another along the same hop path if it is being
> streamed faster.
>
> On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 8:46 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com
> <mailto:gmaxwell@gmail.com>> wrote: 
>
>     If you want to go full out crazy in optimizing in this space, there
>     are fancier things that can be done to further reduce latency and
>     increase efficiency:
>     https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/block_network_coding  ... but
>     some of this stuff really should be done as a seperate protocol. There
>     is no need to have Bitcoin transport all using a single protocol, and
>     we can get better robustness and feature velocity if there are a
>     couple protocols in use (you could just run a block-transport-protocol
>     daemon that connects to your local node via the classic protocol).
>
>
> What about a separate project which is a mesh router specifically
> designed for low-latency transmission of blocks?  It could support
> things like a more sophisticated/configurable routing table, and have
> some kind of discovery where it tries to optimise its topology.  There
> could even be some way for nodes to prove their hash power, so pools
> can find each other and directly peer / prioritise sends.
>

I think the most important change is modifying the way Bitcoin Core
prioritizes blocks.  Right now it uses the first full block verified. 
Instead, it should consider the first valid header received as highest
priority, but only mine on it once it has done full verification of the
block.  In other words, nodes will mine on whatever full/verified block
they have with the earliest header-received time.  If another header
comes in and the tx list is received before the first tx list is done,
then the node will mine the second block *until* it receives and
verifies the first block, then it will switch to mining that first
block.  Most of the time there's no race, it will simply mine the block
N-1 for an extra 1-3 seconds until it receives and verifies the full
block for the new header.

This at least solves part of the problem:  nodes are still only mining
on full blocks, but priority is given to *headers* that come first which
is independent of block size.   As long as a block isn't found within
the 1-3 seconds, then each miner will switch when they finish receiving
and verifying it.  If miners are concerned about that 1-3 second gap,
they should perhaps focus on making sure the tx they are mining are
well-propagated already, so that most of the network has most of the
transactions already in their memory pool by the time their block is mined.

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