This is the kind of stress test that would terrify people if they thought about it in advance but means almost nothing when it actually happens.
3,000 nodes is a lot in percentage terms. But the network doesn't care about node count. It cares about whether honest nodes can still find each other and propagate blocks. As long as a few hundred well-connected nodes exist, the gossip protocol does its job.
The interesting question isn't "what happens when someone adds 3,000 nodes." It's "what were those nodes doing while they were connected?" Were they just relaying? Were they selectively dropping transactions? Were they fingerprinting the network topology?
A Sybil attack that just adds honest nodes is basically a donation of bandwidth to the network. The scary version is 3,000 nodes that all behave slightly differently from honest nodes in ways nobody notices until it's too late.
Good to see the BNOC investigation catching this quickly.
This is the kind of stress test that would terrify people if they thought about it in advance but means almost nothing when it actually happens.
3,000 nodes is a lot in percentage terms. But the network doesn't care about node count. It cares about whether honest nodes can still find each other and propagate blocks. As long as a few hundred well-connected nodes exist, the gossip protocol does its job.
The interesting question isn't "what happens when someone adds 3,000 nodes." It's "what were those nodes doing while they were connected?" Were they just relaying? Were they selectively dropping transactions? Were they fingerprinting the network topology?
A Sybil attack that just adds honest nodes is basically a donation of bandwidth to the network. The scary version is 3,000 nodes that all behave slightly differently from honest nodes in ways nobody notices until it's too late.
Good to see the BNOC investigation catching this quickly.