Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Outbound connections rotation

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 10:21:07 -0700

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 9:46 AM, Ivan Pustogarov <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Hi there,
> I'd like to start a discussion on periodic rotation of outbound connections.
> E.g. every 2-10 minutes an outbound connections is dropped and replaced
> by a new one.

Connection rotation would be fine for improving a node's knoweldge
about available peers and making the network stronger against
partitioning.

I haven't implemented this because I think your motivation is
_precisely_ opposite the behavior. If you keep a constant set of
outbound peers only those peers learn the origin of your transactions,
and so it is unlikely that any particular attacker will gain strong
evidence. If you rotate where you send out your transactions then with
very high probability a sybil pretending to be many nodes will observe
you transmitting directly.

Ultimately, since the traffic is clear text, if you expect to have any
privacy at all in your broadcasts you should be broadcasting over tor
or i2p.