Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping via BitTorrent trackers

[Vladimir Marchenko <vladimir@marchenko.co.uk>]

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@exmulti.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Christian Decker
> <decker.christian@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@exmulti.com
>
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