Can operating a Bitcoin node make you a target?

[Sir Alpha_goy]

With the list of people running nodes so transparent is it possible that in a time of unrest that you could actually become a target?

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/nodes-active/

Surely not everyone is using a VM or proxy right?

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/nodes-active/united-states/

And could the Government use its overreaching powers to get IP addresses and turn them into actual addresses?

[Snorek]

For now I feel it is not a problem, it is not like bitcoin nodes are used as a servers for pirated content or anything.
But in the future if governments would like to take more restrictive approach or shift their mindset to prevent bitcoin spreading it could become troublesome.
Let's hope will will never experience a "Bitcoin Node Witch Hunt".

[franky1]

yes

lets imagine using bitcoin was made illegal, its not. so this is just hypothetical to appease Sir Alpha's thoughts


alot of people think "use proxies". but that only protects the end user from knowing the source user..
ISP's will still know because they are packet sniffing the source user not the destination

a government could via united nations/interpol set up a sudden international tactical strike

this can be done by
https://bitnodes.21.co/
getting all the IP's and finding out which ISP that ip belongs to.
EG in the UK its under 230..in the U.S its under 1500 [nodes]

so imagine tomorrow under 230 homes out of 20 million [UK]households have their internet disconnected
at the same time
in america under 1500 homes out of 100mill [US]households have their internet disconnected
and so on
even things like proxies are useless because the landline has been literally cut off for upto 6000 locations
think its impossible? its not. ISP's have millions of customers and regularly turn the internet off on 10's of thousands of users every week due to breach of contract/non payment of bill.

they would also take bitnodes and other DNS seeding locations offline to further cause drama of new node locations not being able to link up, though smart people will just join an IRC channel and request a list of working ip addresses to manually add node connections [once they sort out their land line disconnection barrier]

as for the network
what would happen is that the countries with no "partnerships" to whatever agency is organising this tactical strike will continue on. and people who are affected would need to either move house or go to court to get their internet ban lifted or change ISP which can take upto 10 days in some cases.

again it wont require an all out "ban the internet" of 1.5billion people. but instead disconnecting the land lines of under 6000 people to cause alot of drama and issues.

the solution is to get more diverse. instead of bitcoin nodes running in just 91 countries it needs to be running in all 200 countries. and also needs to be running via satalite and other non landline/ISP reliant methods

[yayayo]

And could the Government use its overreaching powers to get IP addresses and turn them into actual addresses?

Clearly, government could do this. And maybe its already happening in some countries without our knowledge. To protect nodes and user identities against malicious governments, Bitcoin Core supports simplified setup over the TOR network. Taking Bitcoin nodes offline in all countries is extremely unlikely to work, even with very good international cooperation. And there are already countries and regions, that have formed a positive stance towards Bitcoin (Isle of Man, Switzerland).

In the long run, a carrier independent infrastructure for Bitcoin nodes is still clearly desirable. Sadly, I don't know what happened to Garzik's BitSat project, but it looked quite promising. Even without own satellites, decentralized networks are evolving everywhere and so will decentralized connectivity.

ya.ya.yo!

[aso118]

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/nodes-active/united-states/
And could the Government use its overreaching powers to get IP addresses and turn them into actual addresses?

They can only find out where particular transactions propagated from. It would be tough to conclusively link IP addresses and actual wallet addresses. I don't think that needs to a point of concern, whether you are using tor or not.

[Labumi]

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/nodes-active/united-states/
And could the Government use its overreaching powers to get IP addresses and turn them into actual addresses?

They can only find out where particular transactions propagated from. It would be tough to conclusively link IP addresses and actual wallet addresses. I don't think that needs to a point of concern, whether you are using tor or not.

Everything that exists within this site is indeed less convincing. Because as much as the person who did the research and their trial has not yet been able to ascertain who is using bitcoin transactions that are currently doing. Because it doesn't save your bitcoin confidential data and they can only see the address IP addres addres and also (either the ip that they get it right or just an ip redirection). So if they can do that then it's a good thing, because it could find out who else is using it and from where they get the bitcoin

[Dahhi]

Operating a bitcoin node will make your IP address visible unless you are using a proxy server in case the government decides to search for miners but I do not see that happening because even banks have noticed the advantages of the blockchain.
So why hack down the hen just to keep the egg?

[piloder]

Majority of these nodes are ran on virtual machines thats why majority of nodes seems to be centralized on united states (majority of VPS providers have servers in USA). On the other hand other node operator try to use VPN to protect their privacy if they want, but if government haven't banned use of bitcoin, i don't think any node operator have to worry about getting exposed.

[Soros Shorts]

alot of people think "use proxies". but that only protects the end user from knowing the source user..
ISP's will still know because they are packet sniffing the source user not the destination

Well you could use a reverse-proxy on a low-cost VPS (with sufficient bandwidth but not enough memory and disk) running VPN or SSH services and run the actual full node at home. Your local IPS will only see the encrypted VPN/SSH traffic between your home and the VPS, while the external world would only see the public IP address of the VPS, which could be in another country. I once ran two nodes at home and used this technique, not because I was trying to hide but because I needed a second public IP address for the second node.

If your VPS is located in a different jurisdiction, and if you can pay for the service with bitcoins without furnishing your actual name/aaddress, it would provide some level of isolation from local authorities vs. running a regular full-node at home.

[Pursuer]

Your local IPS will only see the encrypted VPN/SSH traffic between your home and the VPS,

as far as I know if you use a VPN with an SSH tunnel in it your ISP will only see normal packages which will look like connecting to an https url not a VPN connection.

and this is actually the way for hiding the VPN connection from ISPs that are doing Deep packet inspection (DPI) to detect VPN type connections and block it.

[AGD]

I am pretty sure, that nodes are possible targets to attacks, due to the necessary IP leaks. If someone is using a proxy to protect the node, things doesn't change, because that proxy still can be attacked as well as any server.
If you start a node and check with the netstat command, you will see a lot of other nodes IP adresses. If for example DDosed, these servers can be slowed down up to a point, where it will not even be recognized by the other nodes and be "out of the network".

[BigBoom3599]

Sure they could become targets but not every node has a wallet with BTC in it, if we ever come to a point were nodes are actively targeted it should be rather easy to seperate the nodes from your private keys.

[Jet Cash]

I run a full node over public WiFi.

[Kprawn]

It's not unlikely, but very difficult to do globally. If you want to stop everything, you will have to stop all nodes at the same time and that is

highly unlikely. They have tried to stop Tor nodes and they could not do that globally, how are they going to stop Bitcoin nodes? There were

some instances where governments ran Tor nodes and exit nodes were compromised, but there are still 1000's that are not compromised. 

[Ayers]

yes

lets imagine using bitcoin was made illegal, its not. so this is just hypothetical to appease Sir Alpha's thoughts


alot of people think "use proxies". but that only protects the end user from knowing the source user..
ISP's will still know because they are packet sniffing the source user not the destination

a government could via united nations/interpol set up a sudden international tactical strike

this can be done by
https://bitnodes.21.co/
getting all the IP's and finding out which ISP that ip belongs to.
EG in the UK its under 230..in the U.S its under 1500 [nodes]

so imagine tomorrow under 230 homes out of 20 million [UK]households have their internet disconnected
at the same time
in america under 1500 homes out of 100mill [US]households have their internet disconnected
and so on
even things like proxies are useless because the landline has been literally cut off for upto 6000 locations
think its impossible? its not. ISP's have millions of customers and regularly turn the internet off on 10's of thousands of users every week due to breach of contract/non payment of bill.

they would also take bitnodes and other DNS seeding locations offline to further cause drama of new node locations not being able to link up, though smart people will just join an IRC channel and request a list of working ip addresses to manually add node connections [once they sort out their land line disconnection barrier]

as for the network
what would happen is that the countries with no "partnerships" to whatever agency is organising this tactical strike will continue on. and people who are affected would need to either move house or go to court to get their internet ban lifted or change ISP which can take upto 10 days in some cases.

again it wont require an all out "ban the internet" of 1.5billion people. but instead disconnecting the land lines of under 6000 people to cause alot of drama and issues.

the solution is to get more diverse. instead of bitcoin nodes running in just 91 countries it needs to be running in all 200 countries. and also needs to be running via satalite and other non landline/ISP reliant methods

what if the end user and source user have the same owner, that is using another of is pc in a different location or many pc in different part of the world to keep his activity secret? i would you know where he is really located?

[franky1]

what if the end user and source user have the same owner, that is using another of is pc in a different location or many pc in different part of the world to keep his activity secret? i would you know where he is really located?

if you are a agency looking at the end IP.. trying to find the source is hard..
but if you are the ISP knowing every move every source user is doing. it gets easy.

why do you think the "snoopers charter" exists. that governments are requesting ISP's to keep logs of all users AT SOURCE.

we are not talking about trying to locate millions of users using a certain port. we are talking about UK ISP's ability to notice just 230 nodes using a certain port and sending certain size packets of data via them ports. we are talking about US ISP's ability to notice just 1500 nodes using a certain port and sending certain size packets of data via them ports.
you would be surprised how easy that is to do.

many people thing "the whole internet needs to crash to stop bitcoin". or its impossible due to proxies can change in a second.

but if 5000 nodes are physically disconnected from the internet. you will notice it. and the billions of other people who dont know what bitcoin is wont be interupted.

[jackg]

what if the end user and source user have the same owner, that is using another of is pc in a different location or many pc in different part of the world to keep his activity secret? i would you know where he is really located?

if you are a agency looking at the end IP.. trying to find the source is hard..
but if you are the ISP knowing every move every source user is doing. it gets easy.

why do you think the "snoopers charter" exists. that governments are requesting ISP's to keep logs of all users AT SOURCE.

we are not talking about trying to locate millions of users using a certain port. we are talking about UK ISP's ability to notice just 230 nodes using a certain port and sending certain size packets of data via them ports. we are talking about US ISP's ability to notice just 1500 nodes using a certain port and sending certain size packets of data via them ports.
you would be surprised how easy that is to do.

many people thing "the whole internet needs to crash to stop bitcoin". or its impossible due to proxies can change in a second.

but if 5000 nodes are physically disconnected from the internet. you will notice it. and the billions of other people who dont know what bitcoin is wont be interupted.

That is indeed possible however it is not illegal to use Bitcoin in the UK. If htey wanted to shut down these laws, it would already be illegal and they would probably quite easily be able to trace it.
Certain parts would be much more difficult to trace, if people use relays of VPNs for example (more than one VPN connected in an order to a device) then the data is much more difficult for even your ISP to understand. If this VPN is done anonymously and is on a site that doesn't track anything (with a decentralised VPN service) then this makes it almost impossible for the user to be traced without saving packets at both the end point and the start of the connection.

It is possible that bitcoin nodes could be taken down though which would make the use of Bitcoin much more difficult in countries like the UK.

[franky1]

That is indeed possible however it is not illegal to use Bitcoin in the UK. If htey wanted to shut down these laws, it would already be illegal and they would probably quite easily be able to trace it.

lets imagine using bitcoin was made illegal, its not. so this is just hypothetical to appease Sir Alpha's thoughts

[Wind_FURY]

With the list of people running nodes so transparent is it possible that in a time of unrest that you could actually become a target?

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/nodes-active/

Surely not everyone is using a VM or proxy right?

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/nodes-active/united-states/

And could the Government use its overreaching powers to get IP addresses and turn them into actual addresses?

If it does make a person running and maintaining a node a target then they should shut them down, easy. Would that really "end" Bitcoin? No it will not. We have seen people risk their lives and more just in the name of freedom. Running a Bitcoin node will only be a slap on the wrist or less compared to that. Plus the people in the deep dark web will be a welcome source of information on how to better hide your nodes.

[darkangel11]

A target of what? Using bitcoin is totally legal and even if the legality was questionable, what could they do to you? Throw you in jail because you're supporting internet transactions with a vehicle that is not even recognized as money? It's like arresting someone for facilitating an exchange of silverware between two collectors