Topic: Can my ISP tell that i am running a full node ? (Read 1238 times)

It may not be dangerous now but it can be if a government is so determined to ban and outlaw Bitcoin. In America I believe it will be like how they treat the torrent users. The ISP will issue warnings the first 3 times and then report them to the government if they do not listen. Of course in US police state fashion the authorities will break your door down and get 10 swat team members swarm on you and your family inside your home.

knowing who uses bitcoin is super easy, they know all your cookie data.
so even if you use blockchain.info or an exchange as a webwallet.... they know!

they can 'clone' a session with a webservice and look into what you are doing by just emulating the data that goes between you and the website.
so finding how much you have 'online' is easy.

its a little harder to know how much funds you have stored privately (desktop wallet/paper wallet) but just knowing you use bitcoin is a millisecond search for keywords.

though bitcoin is not illegal and so there is no reason/point to care right now.. however KNOWING the weaknesses to prepare for 'possible' future changes is atleast worth it, just to not be shocked if things do change.

also ISP's keep logs for YEARS. so lets say laws change in 5-10 years, they can retrospectively look back and highlight people.
afterall its only 5400 nodes, spread out over 200 counties. so america only has to be concerned with 1500 people, UK under 400 people. so it is easy to manage for them. they are not having to worry about manually searching millions.. just hundreds/thousands. which take milliseconds to find

atmost its less than 1000 people found in only a couple milliseconds per ISP or atmost 1500 per country.
but right now governments are not caring about arresting people for just running bitcoin. so dont be concerned for knocks at the door today. but do be aware what you do now could end up as a red flag if a future law is implemented and they retrospectively look back through logs and then put on a fture watchlist.

You can run a full node without accepting incoming connections.

Tell me, which public WiFi allows you to accept incoming connections on port 8333?

at least there is not a real way for them to know how much bitcoin you have

I run a full node over public WiFi, and I use multiple providers. No ISP will have a full record of my activities, but I expect Microsoft has, as I am using Windows 10 on one of my computers.

Do you think ISPs could start ratting out Bitcoin users to the government? The government could force them to get on board with that easily. ISPs can blacklist all the unlicensed gambling sites in countries where gambling is regulated or forbidden so ISPs could be the ultimate watch dog to keep track on this lucrative Bitcoin business.
I wonder if they are keeping tabs on Bitcoiners with a lot of coins using web wallets. Do you know what they keep on users aside from the metadata you mentioned? Like passwords and search patters or more? Or passwords are encrypted and they can't get their grubby fingers on them?

it only happens in some countries with strictly tight censorship and in places like your school or office which they want to prevent their users like students bypassing their restrictions.

and the only thing that works (in my personal experience) is VPN over an SSH tunnel which makes the traffic look the same as an https connection. and the only good VPN provider that I know of is AirVPN which is offering this feature.

From this article [1] there is a hope to bypass the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and I would recommend OP to use a VPN maybe the nvpn or any other vpn which does not keep logs (they say like that even though they keep logs).

[1] https://support.nvpn.net/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/416/0/how-to-bypass-dpi-deep-packet-inspection

your ISP sees everything you are doing and since bitcoin communications are not encrypted they area easily detectable. your question should instead be "Does my ISP check my traffic for bitcoin"


if you connect with a VPN all your ISP sees are encrypted connections to the VPN IP address and unless they do a DPI they can not figure out if it is VPN or an encrypted connection.

What if you start using a VPN that "does not keep logs", because of the end-to-end encryption the ISP may not see what are you doing, even thought they will notice the large bandwidth that uses a full node.

Running a Bitcoin node is not illegal, but in future things might change and governments might clamp down on people running Bitcoin nodes. The ISPs will have to give up that information, but most
of that information pass through government infrastructure < Internet backbone/ data centres  > , so they might not even have to use them. We are losing the battle against global surveilance,
because all traffic are directed through this infrastructure. We do not have privacy anymore, with all the tools we are using. ^hmmmm^

They'd be able to pick up on it fairly quickly if they went into your history and started searching for that incoming data. That is, assuming, they look for it. Will they? Probably not, but they will be able to find the data pings in any of the data they have stored, which is everything, for something like 2 years.

It's not anything insane, but it isn't simple either. It all depends on the target on your back.

even if you are doing something illicit with bitcoin (not that i am suggesting that) the only way your ISP can find that out is that if they have a court order (like FBI being out there hunting you) and then they install a bitcoin core just to watch all the transactions you broadcast and find out which addresses are yours and where you are sending those coins.

Well ISP can monitor how we run our nodes but I dont believe that it is dangerous. As long as we are not doing any illicit activities then even if we are being subject to monitoring if we are are not doing something wrong then its fine. Well, I agree with you that later on the development of bitcoin the government will place regulation and monitoring system on bitcoin.

They took it upon themselves to make it their job to know what their clients are doing. This is a very dangerous thing because they have the power to censor anyone and anything at the lowest level. OP, if you are speculating if Bitcoin could be "censored", the answer is leaning to no and maybe. But it would be harder for them if there are more full nodes running. Keep maintaining the node for as long as you can.

It would be pretty easy for your ISP to tell, they just have to look for some bits of data and use that, it's not like it would be a hard thing for them to do anyways, especially if they really wanted to go and find out whether or not you had anything.

Like mentioned above, there are a few keywords they can use to analyze the data. That's if they're being lazy too.

no need to watch data packets for specific ports and data sizes live while its being sent.

afterall ISP's are keeping metadata for years on every user(yea we know they keep more then just metadata, but shhh)
meta data is easy..
search keywords: "useragent satoshi"
search keywords: "useragent bitcoin"

Of course.
Unless everything is fully encrypted end-to-end, your ISP or someone in the government can look at the data and tell exactly what you are doing.
All they need to do is look at the ports and protocols you are using.

Probably. They can analyze the data that you are downloading and uploading and notice that the data matches bitcoin transactions and blocks if they are specifically looking for this.

Additionally they will notice that you are connecting out to various IP addresses to port 8333 and that people are connecting to you at port 8333.

Lastly, running a full node consumes a lot of data so the ISP will probably notice that.