The Bitcoin Foundation opened the year with a State of Bitcoin Address sharing a few developments as the Foundation continues in its second year of work. The address is highlighted by the Foundation's impending move to tag their reference client version 0.5.4 with the release label. Other developments include:
- A programmable version string patch by asciilifeform allowing node operators to choose what their node identifies as through a command line flag when bitcoind is started. The default value1 clearly identifies the origin of the node's software, but it delivers substantial value in being able to mimic common nodes in order to draw less attention to the node.
- A script was also delivered by asciilifeform which blocks the Amazon Web Service self reported address ranges using iptables. The purpose of this script is to deny
a great many loud and obvious miscreants
the opportunity to tax a node's resources. AWS is a popular place for parking pseudo nodes and under provisioned nodes while also having an absence of high value nodes.
- Finally foundation treasurer2 and Coinbr founder jurov dedicated substantial time to analysing mempool code and producing a report.3
The address closed with thanks and gratitude.
/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/ (99999) ↩
1FundZy7m7b8begbh9haCguKJcAdFopRJ9 ↩
This is in addition to a substantial report jurov produced for Qntra in November on various SigOP attack avenues in Bitcoin. ↩
Cool idea about the AWS block, will use that for me 0.11 nodes.
> AWS is a popular place for parking pseudo nodes
What a weird idea, given how expensive this shit is. Well, hipsters…
Yeah. AWS is expensive, except for the part where it lets you rent much smaller units of computer than anywhere else.
This, exactly. "Cheap" in the US sense of "make it a tenth the useful size and a third the price" approach to cheapness. Why pay a few hundred for fine leather shoes, hand made when you could pay fifty for some pressed cardboard & glue ?
Anyone using AWS, for good or evil, is dumb and deserves to be banned from the Internet.
There are rock bottom prices for small VPSes (what the cloud is named before hipsters came).
You'll also see that most of the cost is in having IPv4s. In fact, it may be cheaper to get a boring old dedicated server and order additional IP blocks.