> Libbitcoin significantly outperforms bitcoind on a 16GB Raspberry Pi5.
Independent benchmarks so far don’t confirm better performance of Libbitcoin4
I won’t run those benchmarks because in the likely case that they don’t match
up with your marketing slide, you will probably make new fake claims of me not
being honest again, which I am getting very tired of. Instead, I will ask the
community to impartially run benchmarks and share them in a constructive manner.
One important thing to add to that: these benchmarks need to be run without the
network being a significant factor obviously. This is where the config of the
nodes clearly diverges and where (to my understanding at least) Libbitcoin
behaves very differently from Bitcoin Core. First of all, from the config it’s
very clear that you are using 100 outbound connections, which is of course, an
order of magnitude more than what Bitcoin Core uses. But in order to get these
100, Libbitcoin will connect to up to 500 nodes in parallel and let them race
against each other and only keep the ones that are fastest to respond. I could
not identify any other mechanisms to ensure peer diversity of any kind
(correct me if I am wrong here).
This is terrible for many reasons but I will pick the IMO most important ones:
First, making this many connections is not sustainable for the network as a
whole. If every node would be configured like this a new node would have an
extremely hard time finding any connections because the inbound slots would
likely all be exhausted all the time. Second, just taking the nodes that are
the fastest to respond and ignoring everything else is just begging to be
eclipse attacked. Or if there is no attacker, at least to be connected to
only to nodes in the nearest AWS data center.
So these two examples make clear where Bitcoin Core and Libbitcoin really
diverge: Bitcoin Core cares deeply both about the broader network health as
well as the security of the individual node. Performance is great of course
but it usually takes a backseat compared to these other two. Libbitcoin only
cares about performance and that is certainly also a fine approach in
isolation, though personally I wouldn’t run a node that prioritizes that
above network health and security. But what is not fine IMO is to try to dunk
on Bitcoin Core for marketing purposes using only performance numbers and
completely glossing over all these other considerations that Bitcoin Core is
taking into account and you are ignoring. Really the only reason Libbitcoin
can even realistically make 100 outbound connections quickly enough for your
benchmarks to even run at all is because of the very conservative
configurations Bitcoin Core has chosen and which you are repeatedly mocking
on Twitter. And I think it’s also pretty funny that you are accusing me of
trying to off-load hosting cost to the P2P network when you yourself are
exploiting it in a manner that is completely unsustainable.
If you are interested in fixing your eclipse attack vulnerability and related
FWIW, I hate that this conversation has veered so far off-topic, but most of
this ML thread never actually discussed the BIP proposal and I need to respond
to what you are putting out here, including your latest ad-hominem attacks
(“snake oil”, “delusional”). I have also responded in the PR now since you
were trying to put words in my mouth again and I guess I need to repeat
myself over and over now again because, otherwise, my opinion might have
Best,
Fabian