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Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:56:35 -0400
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From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@exmulti.com>
To: Christian Decker <decker.christian@gmail.com>
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Cc: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping via BitTorrent trackers
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On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Christian Decker
<decker.christian@gmail.com> wrote:
> BitTorrent trackers are used to handle several thousands of requests, so
> they would probably scale well enough. I'm not even talking about using the
> DHT trackers, but using old fashioned HTTP based trackers. The fact that
> each bitcoin client would contact the tracker would make it very hard for an
> attacker to get bootstrapping clients to exclusively connect to his
> compromised clients. I would say that using a tracker such as OpenBittorrent
> provides the same advantages as using an IRC channel.

And how does the client discover HTTP trackers?  You're either
hardcoding -those- into the client, or adding an additional bootstrap
step to discover them.  Either way, it has the same problems as other
current methods.

The history and experience of gnutella's web caches vs. UDP host
caches seems highly relevant here.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
exMULTI, Inc.
jgarzik@exmulti.com