Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Double spend detection to speed up transaction trust

From: Andy Parkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 12:58:25 +0100

On 2011 August 05 Friday, Mike Hearn wrote:

> How many connections "should" a node use? We faced this decision in
> BitCoinJ recently and I asked the patch writer to reduce the number.
> It seems pretty arbitrary to me - if you aren't going to relay, a
> single connection should be good enough. Yes, it makes sybil easier,
> but if you pick the one node randomly enough it might be ok?

I don't really see that "number of connections" is the relevant metric.  For a 
well designed bit of software the number of connections shouldn't matter.  
There's a bit of overhead in the operating system per connection, but I'd be 
surprised if that ever became a limiting factor in a stateless system like 
bitcoin.  In fact, bitcoin would work perfectly well as a UDP system (I'm not 
advocating that of course), and then there would be no such thing as a 
connection.

Bandwidth is the measure that's relevant.

Therefore if bandwidth is the measure, just pick a bandwidth you like and 
add/accept connections until you hit that bandwidth limit (probably averaged).  
This has the advantage that it can be measured automatically, or sensibly set 
by a user.

Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Parkins
[email-masked]