Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I'd like to know, how do the bitcoin clients find peers?

I'm wondering if there is some central "tracker" (like bittorrent), but that would seem to go against what I know so far about bitcoin.

Also, whatever this method is, is it immune to abuse/attack.


Another thing I was wondering was whether the network is vulnerable to a Dos type attack using large numbers of tiny transactions?

I hope that's wordy enough for my first post :)



thanks,

eid

anyone?

" How does the peer finding mechanism work?

Bitcoin finds peers primarily by forwarding peer announcements within its own network and each node saves a database of peers that it's aware of, for future use. In order to bootstrap this process Bitcoin needs a list of initial peers, these can be provided manually but normally it obtains them by querying a set of DNS domain names which have automatically updated lists, if that doesn't work it falls back to a built-in list which is updated from time to time in new versions of the software. There is also an IRC based mechanism but it is disabled by default. "

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

The Bitcoin network uses a built-in list of peers and an IRC chatroom to bootstrap.  Nodes also "trade" IP addresses using the "addr" message.

More information here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Network#Bootstrapping

Thanks for the info and links. I'll go and read up some more.





eid

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