Finding peers

[eid]

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

[eid]

anyone?

[Gator-hex]

" 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

[Ondoma]

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

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

[eid]

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





eid

[RaggedClown]

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