Questions tagged [network]
This tag should be used for questions related to the Bitcoin network and communication between different nodes on the Internet.
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Should I leave the Bitcoin client open?
Some people recommended that I leave my Bitcoin client open because it helps the network.
Apart from the security implications, why should I do this? I thought that miners were the ones responsible ...
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What happens to the bitcoin network when the miners all stop in the future?
What happens to the bitcoin network when the miners all stop, years in the future after all the bitcoins have been mined? How will the network continue to function? Won't bitcoins then be useless? ...
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How are bitcoin transactions and the blockchain transferred over the internet?
So I have several specific question connected to this topic and I'm aware of the conceptual answers and I'm only interested in the technical details (with programming terms and concepts as I'm a ...
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How can I setup Bitcoin to be anonymous with Tor?
Bitcoin is billed as many things, among them its anonymity is highly regarded. While it is true that a transaction does not identify a user or wallet, recent news shows that there is the potential for ...
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What encourages Bitcoin miners to relay blocks?
Lets say I'm mining bitcoins, and I've just received a new block that someone else has mined. What encourages me to send that block to anyone else.
I can understand how the original miner wants to ...
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Can someone please explain FIBRE to me like I'm 5 and why is it useful?
I read the website but they imply you already know why this is valuable. Can someone please illuminate me on this issue?
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Moving the Bitcoin folder from AppData
Bitcoin's taking a lot of space on my C drive, and I would like to move it to another drive. I've figured out to do it using symbolic links, but the problem is that my Bitcoin client is currently ...
user1412
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What protection does Bitcoin have against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks?
What protection does Bitcoin have against DoS attacks? Could you bring down a node by flooding it with data?
What happens if someone starts flooding the network with legitimate, yet nonsense, ...
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Why can't I get over 8 connections on my client?
How do I make my client acquire more than 8 connections? What settings in firewall and operating system, or flags at execution do I need to use to allow it?
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How would the Bitcoin protocol be impacted if nodes only stored the blocks they cared about?
Right now, full clients of the Bitcoin network store every block ever generated (while "thin" clients instead rely on a node which does so). This greatly increases first-time initialisation for the ...
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What's the status of alternative full node implementations?
In "Does running an alternative full node implementation benefit the Bitcoin network?", I asked about running an alternative full node implementation for the benefit of the Bitcoin network.
What is ...
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IPv6 support status
What is the current status of IPv6 support?
From what I gathered reading the Wiki, protocol specifications support IPv6, but the original client does not.
However, I also came across the description ...
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Speed of operations in the Bitcoin network
Did anyone measure how fast transactions spread through the Bitcoin network? For example, how long does it take for a newly generated block to be propagated to most active clients?
Mainly asking this ...
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Cannot access my bitcoins because my wallet is still synchronising. What can I do to spend them immediately?
I have purchased bitcoins and have downloaded Bitcoin-QT, but my wallet is taking forever to synchronize to the network.
I can't access my wallet because it is still in the sync process. I have the ...
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How to store data on the blockchain?
I am wondering if it is possible to give someone a bitcoin transaction ID and with that he can read some hidden data, like the blockchain.info notes on transactions, but for real, stored in the ...
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How many MB of data does my bitcoin client have to download to be fully sync'd?
Best guess/calculation?
I transferred some bitcoins to my new wallet after generating an address. This was this morning, and have had my bitcoin wallet syncing all afternoon (5 hours), so far it has ...
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Why is pruning not considered already at the moment?
I understand that Bitcoin scales in several meanings (Scalability), and pruning is one important concept of it (SE Question). I also understand that a "Simplified Payment Verification" (SPV) needs to ...
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Are there any Bitcoin wallets with native I2P integration?
Tor usage seems to be fairly common with Bitcoin, but I have heard less about efforts of integrating with the I2P efforts.
Tor and I2P both have their pros and cons, but I am curious to here about ...
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Why do some transactions take minutes and others take hours?
I sent some bitcoins to an address and then looked on blockexplorer and it was there in about 10 minutes, which is what one should expect.
I did another send to a previously unused address and it ...
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1
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What security features are built in to the standard Bitcoin software?
I have read much of the Bitcoin algorithm and its encryption basis, however little has been said of the software's inherent security.
What solutions are already built in to the software, and what is ...
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Bitcoin client won't connect to the network
I installed Bitcoin QT yesterday and it was very slow to connect to the network. It didn't actually get there for over an hour.
Today I opened it again and it won't connect to the network at all. Any ...
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What are the benefits of Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables for Bitcoin?
Gavin Andresen announced a few days ago, that he started working on Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables.
His repository's README refers to two papers, What's the difference?: efficient set reconciliation ...
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What is the maximum throughput of the Bitcoin network? (2013)
I have heard that the maximum block size means that the Bitcoin network has a maximum throughput. What is this maximum?
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Why does the mainline client limit the number of outbound connections to 8?
The mainline Bitcoin client limits number of outbound connections to 8 however allows up to 125 total connections. To achieve greater than 8 connections (due to outbound limitation) requires either ...
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Why is connecting bitcoin exclusively over Tor considered bad practice?
I've heard that a bitcoin node with only Tor connections is "trivial" to eclipse attack and that such nodes should maintain at least one (or more?) clearnet connections in addition. What is ...
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How can I measure the total hashing power of the Bitcoin network?
Is there a way to measure what is the total hashing power of the Bitcoin network at a given time? For pooled mining it isn't a problem - one can rely on statistics provided by the pool (assuming one ...
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How do Bitcoin nodes know where to send new transactions and blocks to?
I am researching Bitcoin; what I can't find much information on though is how the P2P network itself operates. For example, BitTorrent uses a DHT protocol that allows for node discovery and ...
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Improvements that could be made to how bitcoin propagates its transactions and blocks?
As of 2018 what are the known improvements that could be made to how bitcoin propagates its transactions and blocks?
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What benefit does a non-mining client provide to the network?
I know running a client will help propagate transactions around the network, but I also know a non-mining client will not contribute to the security of the network. Are there any other benefits of ...
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Can I trust the peers I am connected to?
From my understanding of Bitcoin, it operates on a P2P network. Having just downloaded a wallet app, I see it is connected to 6 peers. Does the Bitcoin protocol rely on trusting these peers? What does ...
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With peerblockfilters=1 hundreds of "btcwire 0.5.0/neutrino" connections are downloading TB from my Bitcoin node
I run Bitcoin Core 0.21.0 from a data center, unmetered, with compact block filters enabled (blockfilterindex=1 peerblockfilters=1).
Soon after the restart, I get a huge number (140-200) of ...
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Block messages with transactions hashes instead of full transactions
When a bitcoin node has the blockchain in sync, most transactions in incoming block messages may have been already received as standalone tx messages before.
With a block message with only ...
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Running a Bitcoin node (behind Firewall / NAT or anything else? disallowing inbound connections)
I consider running a bitcoin full node on a raspberry Pi 3. I want to attach the raspberry Pi into my home-network (wifi). When I check my IP address I have a public address to the outside (which is ...
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Will transaction confirmation time be reduced as the network size increases?
Right now it takes 6 confirmations, which takes about an hour to verify a transaction. Will the rate at which transactions confirm become faster over time?
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What is the P2P technology/protocol used by Bitcoin to find nodes and distribute messages across them?
I am wondering if there is a standard/de facto P2P library/implementation/spec used by Bitcoin Core and other implementations of Bitcoin?
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What is the difference between blocksonly and block-relay-only in Bitcoin Core?
The terms blocksonly and block-relay-only that are used in Bitcoin Core are very similar. What is the difference between them?
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What is a block-relay-only connection? What is it used for?
Modern versions of bitcoin core establish a fixed number of outbound connections: 8 outbound-full-relay connections and 2 block-relay-only connections. What is the purpose of block-relay-only ...
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How fast is the Bitcoin (mining) network?
How fast is the Bitcoin mining network compared to other distributed computing networks? ;)
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How does it contribute to the Bitcoin network when I run a node with a bigger than default mempool?
Lately, when the blockspace demand outstrips the default mempool size and the dynamic minimum feerate of nodes rises above the minimum transaction feerate, I often see the suggestion to simply ...
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Are there drawbacks to the Thin Block patch?
Mike Hearn talked about a patch he applied to BitcoinXT recently in his AMA:
I posted a patch last week that makes XT download blocks as lists of hashes instead of duplicating the transaction data, ...
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Looking for a better way of listing all my peers
I am looking for a cheap and efficient way (rather than hacking through the Bitcoin source code) of listing my peers.
Something I have come up with:
#!/bin/bash
netstat -p tcp -nba | grep '.8333.*...
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What can an attacker do if they compromise a DNS seeder?
Recently Bitcoin Core developer Luke-jr was hacked and has stated that we should consider anything owned by him to be compromised. This would include his DNS seeder at dnsseed.bitcoin.dashjr.org. If ...
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What is the maximum, realistic P2P message payload size?
In Bitcoin Core, MAX_SIZE defines the maximum valid P2P message payload size to be 32MB. Is it realistic that a peer sends a message payload close to 32MB? What is the maximum, but still realistic ...
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What is the oldest Bitcoin Core Client that can in theory sync to the chain tip?
I've seen this question regarding the original Satoshi Client being able to sync to the chain tip. The main issues why it doesn't work were:
Change in protocol messages
IRC Node discovery is now ...
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Is there a way to find how many nodes are there?
As a single bitcoind node I can only detect how many connected peers I have. Is there a way to have a vision of the whole bitcoin network?
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What metadata can be captured by a single miner? What about a group of miners?
It is my understanding that the blockchain consist of the following information for every transaction in the network:
From address
To address
Amount of bitcoins
What additional information can a ...
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Uptime and other service performance levels
Other payment networks have scheduled maintenance periods as well as unscheduled outages but Bitcoin's network, being decentralized, can have varying service levels depending on:
which versions of ...
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What is a Feeler Connection? When is it used?
The bitcoin client hard codes a limit of 8 outbound connections and 2 block-only connections. Your node will try to always maintain these 10 outbound connections with reliable peers as a defense ...
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Why is each transaction broadcast twice in the Bitcoin network?
Here is a part of this mail in the mailing list from Satoshi:
The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical
transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each
...
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To run a full node, should I get a static IP address from my ISP?
I have a router connecting my home LAN to the ISP. After opening port 8333 on the router, and forwarding it the computer running the node, bitnodes.io confirmed the node was reachable. However, ...
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