[bitcoin-dev] At least 17% of Bitcoin Core 24.x listening nodes are running full-rbf

[bitcoin-dev] At least 17% of Bitcoin Core 24.x listening nodes are running full-rbf

[Peter Todd]

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tl;dr: By connecting to every Bitcoin Core v24 node I could, and measuring
transaction invs, I determined that at this moment about 17% of all Bitcoin
Core v24 nodes listening on IPv4 are running with full-rbf enabled and
successfully propagating full-rbf replacements.

Procedure:

0) Modify MAX_ADDNODE_CONNECTIONS to 5000 and recompile.
1) Run ./bitcoind -mempoolfullrbf=0 -debug=inv -debug=mempool -debug=mempoolrej
2) Manually addnode every IPv4 address of a node matching 'Satoshi:24' and
   *not* advertising the full-rbf service bit in my DNS seed's 'dnsseed.dump'
   file. This happened to be 692 IPv4 addresses.
3) Wait for connection counts to stabilize. I managed to connect to ~500 nodes
   out of the 692 I tried connecting too.
4) Wait for one of my OpenTimestamps calendars to perform a full-rbf
   replacement¹. They wait a significant amount of time (60s) between
   transactions and blocks to ensure good propagation, and a true full-rbf
   replacement.
5) Wait 2 minutes to ensure complete propagation of the replacement transaction.
6) Run grep <wtxid> ~/.bitcoin/debug.log | grep 'got inv' | wc -l to count the
   number of invs. (I obtained the wtid from another node running full-rbf)
7) Repeat steps 4 to 6 three more times to verify counts are stable.


Discussion:

This data shows substantial adoption of the mempoolfullrbf=1 option among IPv4
listening nodes, above and beyond people choosing to run Bitcoin Knots or
another full-rbf peering fork of Bitcoin Core. This data is also an
underestimate: I'm only measuring successful propagation. Nodes which have
full-rbf enabled - but do not have any full-rbf peers - are not counted by this
measurement. Thus the true number of full-rbf nodes will be even higher than
these stats indicate.

Since v24 nodes are currently only ~5% of all listening nodes, the probability²
of a non-listening node having a full-rbf peer in their outgoing 8 connections
is still low, ~8%. However, if this 17% was maintained as all nodes eventually
upgrade to v24, the probability of a full-rbf peer in the outgoing 8 would be
quite high, ~80%.


Future Work:

How are full-rbf nodes distributed among the IPv4 address space? Bitcoin
Core, by default, groups IPv4 addresses into /16 buckets, and does not connect
to more than 1 outgoing node per bucket. The true probability of connecting to
a full-rbf peer may be changed by this distribution.

How are full-rbf nodes distributed among other connection types? At the moment
bitnodes.io reports that a majority of listening nodes are listening on .onion
addresses. Due to the difficulty of connecting to very large numbers of Tor
nodes at once, and a lack of a convenient source of onion addresses to try, I
did not attempt to measure full-rbf adoption among onion nodes. IIUC a number
of pre-built "node in a box" solutions such as the Start9 Labs Embassy are
currently only able to listen via Tor.

How are full-rbf nodes distributed among non-listening nodes? A potential
strategy to measure this could be to measure inv's on a listening node with a
large number of incoming peers. Anecdotally, I have been told by a number of
people that they're running mempoolfullrbf=1 on non-listening nodes.


References:

1) https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-November/021143.html
2) https://stacker.news/items/98441

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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[bitcoin-dev] onion addresses to try [At least 17% of Bitcoin Core 24.x listening nodes are running full-rbf]

[Vasil Dimov]

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On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 22:06:03 -0500, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev wrote:
[...]
> a lack of a convenient source of onion addresses to try
[...]

$ bitcoin-cli getnodeaddresses 0 |jq -r 'map(select(.network == "onion")) | .[].address'

-- 
Vasil Dimov
gro.DSBeerF@dv
%
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention
of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but
rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out,
and loudly proclaiming --WOW---What A RIDE!!

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Re: [bitcoin-dev] onion addresses to try [At least 17% of Bitcoin Core 24.x listening nodes are running full-rbf]

[Peter Todd]

On December 23, 2022 1:39:13 AM CST, Vasil Dimov <vd@freebsd.org> wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 22:06:03 -0500, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>[...]
>> a lack of a convenient source of onion addresses to try
>[...]
>
>$ bitcoin-cli getnodeaddresses 0 |jq -r 'map(select(.network == "onion")) | .[].address'

It's not that simple. Because onion addresses cost close to nothing nothing to obtain it's dubious to just try some on a one time basis without checking to see if they actually have a longer term track record of actually existing. You could end up trying addresses of a one time Sybil attack.

The advantage of using the DNS seed records is those addresses are tested over long time frames, so you have a better chance of them representing real nodes. But my DNS seed doesn't happen to be setup to track nodes using Tor right now.