/biz/ - Business & Finance

There's a recent paper on routing in Bitcoin. It's wrong. Not because you can't hijack ASNs but because there are so many links. You can knock a node off and attack an individual, but you don't need to take over an ASN to do that. Now, what they also failed to say is, if you did that attack, you would take over 99% of commercial Internet providers. You would take over every military network on Earth. You would take over all of the telecomms' links. And do you think attacking all these core routers and doing that will be allowable just because it's Bitcoin?

I mean, honestly forks, to attack these routers and take over the core BGP systems. Well, not going to happen. Yes, ISPs can make you part of the... they can prune you. Uses your phone, use 3G. Whatever. Multi-home.

So, it is a semi-complete ring. It is actually bigger than a small-world network. These transaction graphs people keep doing are not Bitcoin. They are how economics works. When you have a transaction graph of transactions going from party A to B to C to D, that's how people spend money, not how nodes connect. Have we not thought about that? You can't model Bitcoin looking at how transactions flow between addresses. You look at the connectivity from the nodes.