Topic: ISP's meddling with bitcoin protocol? (Read 4290 times)

 OpenMesh has a really good central management utility called CloudTrax.  There is a way to set it up where a part of the over-the-air configuration isolates all the nodes so no one could access the other's stuff.  I have also used EnGenius units for wireless bridging or long range/wide spectrum WiFi.  It seems to be a basically scaled down version of the cellphone antennas you see around town.

There is no practical way to stop the blockchain as long as their is net neutrality its just a ledger of transactions that can be downloaded from the internet like anything else.
If it could be blocked then we have a bigger problem because this means that the government has destroyed net neutrality.

The solution to that would be a bitcoin based protocol like Namecoin perhaps that said  Bitcoin nodes are decentralized worldwide so it's not like it is possible to block all the ports and communications would still exist.

The network would operate and miners would still be mining so updating the Blockchain would always be possible
https://blockchain.info/nodes-globe
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-nodes-need/

If you install a new client just download up to the latest blockchain would also work as well
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/

Think I covered the possible solutions if off feel free to correct me.

What happens if the government try to stop the protocol? What i the most practical way to go around their attempts to block ports etc?

Perhaps a little harsh, but pithy and to the point.  Humans are poor at this sort of task, it's best to look at a large random sample size and calculate a mean.

Maybe some wireless mesh then. And yes, I agree that there would need to be some sort of voluntary regulation amongst users.

Hi freedombit


Problem with internet (any network) via the electricity grid is the attenuation with every spike arrestor, connection, transformer, meter box etc, even if you bypass transformers and other barriers your talking about a lot of money/time and effort when it's cheaper just to run a new cable that's meant for data networks, or use whats already there for coms, like telephone cable.


you also require some form of agreement between hosts so they can talk to each other, routing tables, owner information, DNS etc.
No reason it cant be 'self regulated' but thats another topic

Yes. What ever happened to mesh networks?

Also, Internet via electricity conduits. I recall seeing something like this. I think it was called freedombox, and being sold in the middle east to provide homes with access to the Internet via the electricity grid. Similar thinking to crypto currency - no central authority, so it couldn't be easily regulated.

Not unusual for the QT client to upload up to 700MB of data a day for me, I would expect this to be dependent on your ISP, and the number of other clients on that network.

This affected me during initial sync only. Do you experience it after your initial sync?

Just the way that it was designed. They had to split the freq spectrum between download and upload. Since high download speeds sell better they portioned a greater amount to it.

why is that?  that always pissed me off.   

Bitcoin core may suck all available bandwidth if you run it over a router connected to an ISP over DSL, which typically has a decent download speed but a pathetic upload speed.  Things may run fine for several days, but sooner or later one or more newbies will start downloading the 20 GB blockchain through your computer. At this point if you have a typical home router that allocates available bandwidth in a dumb way your Internet connection will be hosed. 

A simple solution is to limit the upload bandwidth that bitcoin core can get.  Since bitcoin-core does not provide any control for this (unlike most bittorrent clients) you will have to use some other method of limiting its access. I found that my router (leased from my ISP) provided some quality of service feature that would allow me to limit the bandwidth of each of my computers by putting their uploads into separate queues, but this didn't help the problem for me because I was running bitcoin core and other software on the same machine (a Windows 7 system).

I fixed my problem by using the Windows Group Policy Manager and adding a rule to limit the upload bandwidth used by bitcoind.exe.  This got the job done.  I set it to about 50% of my available upload bandwidth, which is more than enough to keep up with new transactions and new blocks, while still allowing people to download old blocks, albeit at a slow rate.  Now web browsing is unaffected by running the bitcoin node on the same computer. I also have another computer that controls some miners.  This machine was getting a lot of stales until I solved my congestion problem.

I've also has this issue.  So the question is am I using that much bandwidth, or is my ISP throttling me?

I noticed a problem similar to that

Bitcoinqt can clog up your bandwidth.

I know that my gaming servers ping goes from 300ms to 29ms after I close bitcoinqt

To my knowledge ISPs have not messed with Bitcoin at this time but it is a possibility Comcast is not one of the best companies out there if you know how hard it is for cities to get municipal wire aka local internet installed in their cities, also Comcast does keep IP logs for 180 days so they do sniff their traffic anyways it piqued my curiosity tell me how it goes
https://torrentfreak.com/how-long-does-your-isp-store-ip-address-logs-120629/

It's scary to think about this..  Internet providers could essentially kill anything they view as a threat.

that may make sense.
if ISP had set a throttle on a "p2p traffic" and they would measure bitcoin as such, having a torrent node running could have basically consume all the p2p limit, thus living far less for bitcoin than you actually think it has.

This is actually sort of a (big?) deal to me, potentially, as my ISP limits my P2P traffic to 0.5KB/s - 1.5KB/s.

Now I know that this is probably actually still fast enough to upload a transaction, but what it says to me is that an ISP could, if ordered to, block P2P traffic, right?

Of course I bought VPN subscription so that I can download P2P at my full bandwidth of 38Mb/s

That's not an insignificant concern, though. A lot of ISPs still have a knee-jerk "p2p is bad" reaction, whether due to ignorance or pressure from the copyright industries. I remember reading a story about an ISP that explicitly banned all p2p apps on their network; and a surprising number of hosting providers ban p2p as well, which can impact publicly hosted nodes.  There were also cases where an ISP would effectively commit a man-in-the-middle attack against http traffic to insert their own advertising into a Web page; I vaguely remember that it worked against https as well, due to the ISP's installer putting their own certificates into the client's trusted list. So there's a history of having to deal with hostile ISPs.

It might be worth exploring the ways that a hostile ISP could interfere with or block bitcoin data, both at a network level (blocking p2p, slowing it down) and at a data level (modifying the actual data being transmitted), and how the protocol and the reference client handle (or should handle) such attacks.