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

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:27:18 +0200

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

It's also the first/next step towards decentralising the DNS seeds (for SPV
clients), as it'd allow each node to explore the network and return better
quality results in getaddr.

> 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.
>

This is sort of what Tor is going through with their guard nodes and how
often to rotate them.

I think the attack Ivan is talking about does not require sybil attacks to
work though, just listening to lots of peers. Raising the bar to require
the attacker to receive lots of connections seems like a win.