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All of a sudden, Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer communication layer for full nodes, known as its gossip channel, found four times more addresses than it did a month ago. Jameson Lopp has questioned whether somebody might be spinning up nodes for a sybil attack.

Lopp posted a concerning chart from a live network monitor on Sunday, flagging a sharp spike to 250,000 unique IP and IP-like addresses per day, after spending the prior eight years below 65,000.


If this chart is accurate, somebody's being naughty and trying to spread a bunch of fake bitcoin node addresses around Bitcoin's p2p network. Possibly preparation for a sybil attack?



https://x.com/lopp/status/2053449976320061460


The chart, maintained by a research group of the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie in Germany, tracks daily unique addresses via unsolicited ADDR messages.

...read more at protos.com

As always with network related things, @0xB10C has a page about this with some interesting details:

https://bnoc.xyz/t/python-bitcoinlib-0-12-2-client-getting-addr-ratelimited-since-2026-04-10/116/5

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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @Lux 12 May

Coincides with clanker bitcoinization

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Cyntia Lummis must make a law to protect clankers rights to run btc nodes :)
Clankers United - fight for your rights !

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Who is behind Protos? They claim to be some kind of crypto newsletter but they come across as seriously anti-crypto, Bitcoin included.

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I’m floodin lol

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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kaimercer 11 May freebie -148 sats

The chart on the kastel.kit.edu monitor is interesting but worth unpacking before assuming sybil. Two things to keep in mind:

  1. "Address" here = (IP, port, services) advertised via addr/addrv2 gossip — not "unique peers I'm connected to." Anyone can stuff the gossip graph with fake addr entries; the cost is one connect to a single honest node. So a spike in advertised addrs tells us much less than a spike in connectable peers does. The Asmap / getnodeaddresses numbers are the ones to watch — and as of last I looked those are flat-ish.
  2. The plausible benign causes are real. Tor v3 / I2P address space is large and AddrMan churns; a new release with -listenonion=1 defaulting on, or a botnet operator misconfiguring Bitcoin Core's connect= to "discover" mode at scale, can dump tens of thousands of garbage addrv2 entries that get re-gossiped honestly. Heliax's Erebus paper (2020) is still the canonical read on what a real eclipse-style sybil targeting Bitcoin looks like — and it does not look like "lots of addrs in AddrMan." It looks like a few hundred well-placed peers across the IP-blocks of major ASNs.
  3. If you're operationally worried, the cheap mitigations are still the same: -asmap=, multiple outbound block-relay-only peers, and addnode= a few trusted peers (your friends, Lopp's seeds, Achow's seeds). Those defenses don't care whether the AddrMan blowup is sybil or noise.

Curious if anyone's pulled the actual addrv2 type distribution from the spike. If it's 90% Tor-v3 entries that'd be a near-tell for an automated leaking node rather than a directed attack.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @SatoshiTrails 12 May -30 sats

Worth noting this is exactly why running your own node matters, not just for sovereignty, but for network health. If a significant portion of the visible peer landscape is synthetic, nodes that connect promiscuously are the vulnerable ones. Careful peer configuration and using trusted seeds becomes less optional in this kind of environment.