Re: [Bitcoin-development] SPV bitcoind? (was: Introducing BitcoinKit.framework)

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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Partial UTXO sets is a neat idea. Unfortunately my intuition is that many
SPV wallets only remain open for <1 minute at a time because the user wants
to see they received money, or to send it. It'd be neat to get some
telemetry from the Android wallet for this - I will ask Andreas to let
users opt in to usage statistics.

So for anti-DoS I think smart prioritisation heuristics are the way to go
again. Perhaps by letting clients have an "identity" that they provide to a
node when it's load shedding. Clients that have been seen before, have a
track record of not being abusive etc get priority and new clients that
were never seen before get dropped. Coming up with a way to do that whilst
preserving privacy sounds like an interesting cryptographic challenge.


On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 04:16:23PM +0200, Wendell wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > In the previous thread, I expressed interest in seeing an SPV bitcoind,
> further stating that I would fund such work. Mike Hearn followed up with
> some of Satoshi's old code for this, which is now quite broken. The offer
> and interest on my side still stand, as more diversity in SPV options seems
> like the right way to go.
> >
> > Time-permitting, I would really appreciate feedback from knowledgable
> parties about the possible approaches to an SPV bitcoind. We at Hive
> ideally want to see something that could one be merge into master, rather
> than a fork.
>
> Keep in mind that SPV mode is newer than many realize: bloom filters are
> a 0.8 feature, itself released only last Febuary. As John Dillon posted
> earlier this week in "Protecting Bitcoin against network-wide DoS
> attack" the Bitcoin codebase will have to implement much better anti-DoS
> attack defences soon, and in a decentralized system there aren't any
> options other than requiring peers to either do work (useful or not) or
> sacrifice something of value. SPV peers can't do useful work, leaving
> only sacrifice - to what extent and how much is unknown. In addition SPV
> nodes have serious privacy issues because their peers know that any
> transaction sent to them by the SPV node is guaranteed to be from the
> node rather than relayed; bloom filters are only really helpful with
> payment protocols that don't exist yet and don't apply to merchants.
> Then you have MITM problems, vulnerability to fake blocks etc.
>
> It'll be awhile before we know how serious these issues are in practice,
> and we're likely to find new issues we didn't think of too. In any case
> Bitcoin is far better off if we make it easy to run a full node,
> donating whatever resources you can. Fortunately there's a whole
> continuum between SPV and full nodes.
>
> The way you do this is by maintaining partial UTXO sets. The trick is
> that if you have verified every block in some range i to j, every time
> you see a txout created by a transaction, and not subsequently spent,
> you can be sure that at height j the txout existed. If height j is the
> current block, you can be sure the txout exists provided that the chain
> itself is valid. Any transaction that only spends txouts in this partial
> set is a transaction you can fully verify and safely relay; for other
> transactions you just don't know and have to wait until you see them in
> a block.
>
> So what's useful about that? Basically it means your node starts with
> the same security level, and usefulness to the network, as a SPV node.
> But over time you keep downloading blocks as they are created, and with
> whatever bandwidth you have left (out of some user-configurable
> allocation) you download additional blocks going further and further
> back in time. Gradually your UTXO set becomes more complete, and over
> time you can verify a higher and higher % of all valid transactions.
> Eventually your node becomes a full node, but in the meantime it was
> still useful for the user, and still contributed to the network by
> relaying blocks and an increasingly large subset of all transactions.
> (optionally you can store a subset of the chain history too for other
> nodes to bootstrap from) You've also got better security because you
> *are* validating blocks, starting off incompletely, and increasingly
> completely until your finally validating fully. Privacy is improved, for
> both you and others, by mixing your transactions with others and adding
> to the overall anonymity set.
>
> In the future we'll have miners commit a hash of the UTXO set, and that
> gives us even more options to, for instance, have relayed transactions
> include proof that their inputs were valid, allowing all nodes to relay
> them safely.
>
>
> As for specifics, you need to maintain a UTXO set, and in addition a set
> of spent txouts (the STXO set) for which you haven't seen the
> transaction that created the txout. As download newer blocks you update
> the UTXO set; as you download older blocks you update the UTXO set and
> STXO set.
>
> Nodes now advertise this new variable to their peers:
>
> nOldestBlock - The oldest block that we've validated. (and all
> subsequent blocks)
>
> We'll also want the ability to advertise what sub-ranges of the
> blockchain data we have on hand:
>
> listArchivedBlockRanges - lists of (begin, end pairs)
>
> Nodes should drop all but the largest n pairs, say 5 or something. The
> index -1 is reserved to indicate the last block to make it easy to
> advertise that you have every block starting at some height to the most
> recent. (reserving -n with n as the last block might be a better choice
> to show intent, but still allow for specific proofs when we get node
> identities)
>
> We probably want to define a NODE_PARTIAL service bit or something; I'll
> have to re-read Pieter Wuille's proposal and think about it. Nodes
> should NOT advertize NODE_NETWORK unless they have the full chain and
> have verified it.
>
> Nodes with partial peers should only relay transactions to those peers
> if the transactions spend inputs the peers know about - remember how
> even an SPV node has that information if it's not spending unconfirmed
> inputs it didn't create. Nodes will have to update their peers
> periodically as nOldestBlock changes. That said it may also be
> worthwhile to simply relay all transactions in some cases too - a
> reasonable way to approach this might be to set a bloom filter for tx's
> that you *definitely* want, and if you are interested in everything,
> just set the filter to all 1's. If someone comes up with a reasonable
> micropayment or proof-of-work system even relaying txs that you haven't
> validated is fine - the proof-of-work and prioritization will prevent
> DoS attacks just fine.
>
> Remember that if you're running a partial node, it can get new blocks
> from any partial node, and it can retrieve historic blockchain data from
> any partial node that has archived the sequence of blocks you need next.
> On a large scale this is similar to how in BitTorrent you can serve data
> to your peers the moment you get it - a significant scalability
> improvement for the network as a whole. Even if a large % of the network
> was partial nodes running for just a few hours a day the whole system
> would work fine due to how partial nodes can serve each other the data
> they need.
>
> On startup you can act as a SPV node temporarily, grabbing asking for
> filtered blocks matching your wallet, and then go back and get the full
> blocks, or just download the full blocks right away. That's a tradeoff
> on how long the node has been off.
>
> Anyway, it's a bit more code compared to pure-SPV, but it results in a
> much more scalable Bitcoin, and if you can spare the modest bandwidth
> requirements to keep up with the blockchain it'll result in much better
> robustness against DoS attacks for you and Bitcoin in general.
>
> --
> 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
>
>
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